The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

by Emily Croy Barker

  Her tone was accusing. She could not soften it much, even as she made her request—it came out as more of a command—to do the observation spell again that night. She had the conviction that if she could just return to her father’s house, in whatever form, she could find some way to communicate with him or her stepmother.

  Aruendiel refused. There was no guarantee, he pointed out, that they would reach her father’s house on the same night. Days or weeks could have passed already. And if her sister’s fever had gone, she might not be able to see them.

  Furthermore, he added, Nora was distraught—a poor frame of mind for doing strong magic.

  He was regretting, it was clear, that he had ever performed the observation spell in the first place.

  “So I should just let my family think I’m dead?” she demanded at last. “Do you think that’s right?”

  “For now, Nora, you do not have a choice,” he said wearily.

  She sat in silence, thinking again of the twin photographs in her sister’s room, wondering why Ramona had chosen those two. The Nora in the photograph was grinning a bit too broadly, trying to cover up her disquiet at the prospect of figuring out what to do with the degree she had just earned. In EJ’s case, it was his school photo from tenth grade. The camera had caught him with his mouth slightly open, revealing the glint of braces, giving him an undeserved appearance of dullness. It was an awful picture, really. Maybe those two photos were the only ones that Ramona could find to fit the frames.

  “So I’m dead to them,” Nora said resentfully. The phrase did not have the same resonance in Ors that it did in English. “I suppose there’s no chance that I’m really dead, is there? You said no once—but I did give Ramona a scare.”

  “Of course not,” Aruendiel said, his expression softening. “You are very much alive.”

  His assurance relieved but did not mollify her. Nora cast about for a new direction in which to loose her roiling guilt and anger. “You were dead once,” she said, with a sense that her words would burn. “Really dead. Isn’t that right?”

  The gray gaze might have slipped sideways for an instant—impossible to say for sure. “Where did you hear that? More tittle-tattle from Semr?”

  “Hirizjahkinis told me.”

  “Ah, Hirizjahkinis,” he said brusquely. “She should scratch her own fleabites and leave my affairs in peace.”

  “She helped bring you back to life.”

  “She’s proud of that.”

  “Why shouldn’t she be?” Nora said, pressing for something more, not sure what.

  “It was Euren the Wolf’s magic, more than hers. And as a piece of magic, it was—well, only adequate. It took years for me to recover from my injuries.” With a grimace, he added: “Even now, I am not healed completely.”

  “Well, you’re alive,” Nora said, irked on Hirizjahkinis’s behalf by his lack of evident gratitude.

  “They should have spared themselves their trouble. There was no good reason to resurrect me,” Aruendiel said in the tone of one stating an unvarnished fact. “They would have won the war without me, eventually. I’d lived a long time. I had no close ties. My children were gone by then, even my grandchildren. My wife was dead. I had killed her not long before.”

  He added the last piece of information deliberately, as though Nora might have forgotten it.

  “Yes, you’d mentioned that,” she said coolly. Then, her voice rising slightly, she added: “That’s something I can’t figure out, by the way. I just don’t understand. That you would kill someone weaker than yourself.” The thought of Aruendiel stabbing his wife had become more terrible over time, not less. “It seems”—she chose her words carefully—“dishonorable.”

  Aruendiel’s eyes narrowed. “She was the one who’d behaved with dishonor.”

  “So it was all right to kill her?”

  “I was very angry,” he said flatly.

  “Is that an excuse?”

  “Of course not. You asked for an explanation. She cried and clung to his body. What did she expect?” Aruendiel’s voice was taut. “That I would spare him, the one who stole my wife from me? It was my right to challenge him. I used no magic. It was a fair fight. I won. And then she wept, she screamed. She was holding him, her belly swollen with his child. It was as though she did not even see me. I put the blade between her ribs and walked out of that cursed room.”

  Nora thought of Aruendiel’s swordplay with the rope-and-broomstick puppet in this very hall: snick snick snick thrust. She looked straight at him, taking in every line of the harsh, graven face; unable to think of what to say, she fell back on Shakespeare. “Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men?”

  “More men? She betrayed me.” He added abruptly: “She loved him.”

  “Well, presumably—”

  Aruendiel fixed her with a pale glare. “You fail to understand. She loved him. I meant to free her from enchantment—but there was no enchantment. No spells of any kind infecting her heart. She’d gone with him of her own free will. It was the cleverest and cruelest part of Ilissa’s revenge.”

  “Ilissa?” Nora asked.

  “Of course. It was all her doing.”

  “You stabbed your wife.”

  “Ilissa set the trap,” Aruendiel said. “It was her trickery. She hated me. She had been my mistress,” he added, his voice hard.

  “You told me that once. So you think,” Nora said, not bothering to keep the disbelief out of her tone, “Ilissa arranged for your wife to fall in love with someone else?”

  “Exactly.” He was silent, then spoke with a kind of grim eagerness, as though he had made up his mind to advance through hostile territory no matter what the cost: “From the moment my marriage was announced, I feared Ilissa would strike at my wife. I took precautions. I guarded Lusarniev with the most powerful protection spells I could devise. I watched to ensure that she was under no kind of enchantment.

  “When Lusarniev gave birth to a stillborn boy, I thought instantly of Ilissa. But to all signs the child had died of natural causes. It was the same when Lusarniev miscarried again, and then again. The third time, I even called in another magician, my friend Nansis Abora. He waited upon my wife and then told me privately that he could find no enchantment, and he confirmed what the doctors had said, that she should regain her strength before she became pregnant again.

  “Lusarniev herself was terribly fearful of bearing another dead child. So I absented myself from the marriage bed until she could grow stronger. It was not strictly necessary. There are magical means to keep babies from coming. But it made Lusarniev calmer in her mind.

  “And then one day I came home to find my wife gone. She had left with Melinderic, a knight attached to my household.

  “He was not much older than my wife. His grandfather had been one of my comrades in the Pernish wars. I had made Melinderic my principal deputy for the sake of the old connection and because he was intelligent, forthright, reliable. I trusted him completely.

  “For all the care that I took to make sure that Ilissa had not enchanted my Lusarniev, I never thought to examine Melinderic.”

  “You’re saying that Ilissa put a love spell on him?” Nora asked.

  “Yes, of course,” Aruendiel said impatiently. “You should know something about Faitoren love spells. It was quite powerful.”

  “And your wife—” Against her will, Nora found herself believing him. Ignorant of magic, Lady Lusarniev would have known only that the young man was in love with her. And knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain.

  “So he seduced her,” Aruendiel said. “And then there was a child on the way.” He laughed starkly. “All my concern for my wife’s health went to good account, did it not? She only wished to avoid bearing a child to me.” More quietly, he added: “I would have staked my life on her honor. I had never known her to do anything before that was not correct and graceful.”

  At these last words, Nora felt sudden dislike for the dead woman. She tried to ignore it
in the cause of female solidarity. “But your life wasn’t at stake, was it?” she said. Aruendiel did not answer. “I feel even sorrier for her now,” Nora said staunchly. “She died because of a love affair that wasn’t even real. He only loved her because of magic.”

  “Her feeling for him was real enough,” Aruendiel said acidly. “She made me a laughingstock. People said I should have known better, after all the times that I’d cuckolded other men. But—” He shook his head. “That was exactly why I never imagined she’d be unfaithful. The wives I’d seduced were discontented. Their husbands neglected them. Lusarniev—we’d been married only three years. I would have sworn she was completely happy to be my wife. I paid her every attention, and she ranked among the greatest ladies of the kingdom.”

  “Why did you marry her?”

  “Why?” He seemed surprised by the question. “She was precisely the kind of woman I intended to marry. An excellent lineage. A lovely face. She was only eighteen when I met her, but she had a composure and bearing that I admired, that came from being carefully brought up. She knew how to behave at court, how to run an estate. I understood the sort of people that she came from. She was perfectly suited to be my wife.”

  “It sounds as though you were hiring her for a job,” Nora said tartly. “What did she think about your being a magician?”

  He opened his hand in a dismissive gesture. “That was not her concern. She was pleased to be the wife of a famed magician, of course, but it mattered less to her than other things.”

  “Well, it doesn’t seem like a great marriage to me,” Nora said, “not that that was any excuse for killing her. You chose her because she was safe and predictable, she wasn’t interested in what you’re most interested in—and we haven’t even touched on the age difference. She was eighteen, and you were what, a hundred and thirty?”

  “It was a fine marriage,” Aruendiel said. “If not for Ilissa’s meddling.” He brooded for a moment. “Yes, I was far older than Lusarniev, but it meant only that I knew what I needed in a wife. Lusarniev was all that, and I cherished her for it.”

  Nora felt another uncomfortable twinge of irritation toward the deceased Lady Lusarniev. “Too bad you killed her, then.” Honorably, she added: “And maybe you shouldn’t blame her so much for falling in love with another man. Ilissa probably put some extra glamour into that love spell to make Melinderic more attractive.”

  “He was handsome enough already,” Aruendiel said, with distaste.

  “Your wife was what, twenty-one? That’s very young.”

  Aruendiel glanced at her with a flicker of what might have been amusement, but it faded. “Yes, she was very young,” he said heavily. “You know, I cannot even recall exactly what she looked like, except for that last wild look before she died. I remember that she was beautiful, but I cannot picture her beauty.

  “Then I went after Ilissa. She’d stirred up her own war by then. I did not especially care what the war was about. I only wanted to kill Ilissa.

  “Instead, she killed me.

  “In battle, those last weeks, I was strangely distracted, clumsy. I thought that anger would sharpen my powers, as it always had in the past, but not this time. I could not seem to judge the strength of my own magic—my spells were either far too strong or not strong enough. Did Hirizjahkinis tell you how I died?”

  “She said you fell from one of those flying contraptions.”

  “An Avaguri’s mount,” Aruendiel said. “There had been other near misses in combat, but I was lucky the other times, or my allies covered for me. That day, in the Tamicr Mountains, I was chasing Ilissa, putting all my energies into the curse I was sending after her, and suddenly I felt myself falling. One of her illusions, I knew, and yet I reflexively leaned hard to the right, trying to correct my balance. And then I really did fall, right off my mount.”

  “You could have saved yourself,” Nora said crossly, feeling a perverse satisfaction in pointing out the missed opportunity. “You could have raised a wind—transformed yourself into a bird—summoned the Avaguri’s mount back to you.”

  “For some reason, I did none of those things,” he said. “I remember the sunlight on the snow below me was so dazzling that I had to close my eyes. And then I remember hitting the mountainside and not being able to move. Then I fell again. This time the ground fell with me. That was the avalanche, from what they told me later. I don’t remember anything else. Evidently I died very quickly.”

  “And then what?” she demanded.

  “Then they found my body and revived it, Euren, Hirizjahkinis, and the others, sometime later.”

  “But what happened in the meantime?”

  “In the meantime? I was dead.”

  “What do you remember? You must remember something.” When Aruendiel said nothing, Nora pursued: “You—your soul must have been somewhere. Or they wouldn’t have been able to bring you back.”

  “Those who come back from death have nothing to tell. Were you paying no attention when I resurrected the child Irseln?”

  Nora remembered the puzzled shadow on Irseln’s face, the way she had ducked her father’s greedy questioning. Was she fearful because of what she remembered, or fearful because she could not remember? “She was a little girl. You’re a grown man and a magician,” Nora said. “You must have some recollection.”

  Slowly Aruendiel’s gaze pulled away from Nora’s and roamed across the darkened hall. “I remember a sense of—engagement,” he said. “I was occupied with something that required my full attention. I can remember this only because I was conscious of being interrupted when they called me. I had no great interest in answering their call, but they persisted. So then I went to see what it was all about.”

  “What do you mean, ‘went to see’? Was it an actual journey?”

  He shook his head. “It was not a matter of physical distance. I found the four of them: Euren, Meko Listl, Hirizjahkinis, Lernsiep. I do not think I could have named them, then, but I knew who they were, and I knew they were there because of me. Their concern for me seemed absurd, misguided. I watched them, bemused that they were going to such trouble.

  “Then—I do remember this quite clearly—I recognized my corpse, lying in the middle of their small circle. I could not see it exactly as the living see, but I could perceive that it was wrecked, empty. Whatever utility that body had once served was ended. And that should have been enough for me.

  “The corpse was familiar, though. That was what drew me. I was curious”—he spoke the word with contempt—“the way one might have a whim to visit a place that one knew long ago.

  “So, I lingered. I could see the corpse more clearly now, probably through the eyes of the others. I felt no particular emotion when I saw that half of my face was a smashed ruin. But my hands—” He lifted them from the table and turned them back and forth, inspecting them thoughtfully. “In some ways, we know our hands better than our faces. In life, I had never seen them so still and helpless. I felt pity that they would never move at my will again. And then—more curiosity,” Aruendiel said. “I wondered what it would be like to enter into the flesh again.

  “That was all it took. I was caught.

  “In an instant, I knew what it was to be alive again. Suddenly I needed air; I had no choice but to fill my lungs. I remembered cold, and then I remembered—well, I discovered what it is like to be broken in a dozen dozen places.

  “As I said,” he added, with a sour rictus, “there was no good reason to resurrect me.”

  He stopped speaking. Nora ran a fingertip over the table, tracing a figure eight. “You didn’t encounter your wife while you were dead, by any chance?” she asked suddenly.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t remember anything, except at the very end, when you came back.”

  “This is correct.”

  Aruendiel’s calm assertion of seamless ignorance—so uncharacteristic—was profoundly unsatisfying. She wondered if he was lying. But if he was not lying, what t
hen? To know that there was something after death but not to know what it was, the undiscovered country still undiscovered, whether it was torture, hellfire, bliss, boredom, nothingness—what was the comfort of that?

  “How did they bring you back? What spell?” she demanded.

  For once, Aruendiel seemed oddly reluctant to talk about the particulars of a piece of magic. “Some of Euren’s wolf magic, to try to heal the corpse’s wounds and make it fit for life again,” he said dismissively. “A binding spell, to help bring spirit and body together. And to summon the spirit, that was more wolf magic. They simply sat together, the four of them, and called for me for a long time.”

  “What do you mean, called for you?”

  “By name, by thought.” He shrugged irritably. “It’s how the wolves call back their dead, according to Euren. Very loose, subjective, like all animal magic.”

  Nora shook her head violently, as though she could dispel the sudden wave of fearful recognition that had washed over her. “I don’t believe you,” she said.

  Aruendiel glanced at her, surprised.

  “You know, after my brother’s accident, when he was in the hospital,” she said, finding her voice shifting, unsettled, “that’s exactly what we did, my parents and I. We spent days in his room, talking to him, looking for any sign that he heard us. And there was nothing. He wasn’t even dead yet.

  “If he had been somewhere, if he could have heard us, he would have come. If it had been possible to bring him back, we would have done it. Even without magic, we would have done it.”

  Aruendiel answered slowly: “I cannot say whether your brother heard your call or not, Nora, or whether he could have answered it. Perhaps it was better for him not to.”

  “Better? Better?” Nora stood up. Finally her surging discontent had found a suitable outlet. “Is that what you meant when you said the dead owed nothing to the living? That we shouldn’t disturb the dead with our grief? The way your friends disturbed you? Listen, you were lucky that they did that! You were lucky to have friends who loved you enough to sit around your dead body and grieve and call and try to drag you back into the world. Because I can tell you, it’s painful to do that, it’s horrible, to call and call and not know if anyone will answer.