The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic (12 page)

The light faded and the sky outside turned to bluish purple. Nora was almost ready to give up and take the draft when she heard the clop of a horse's hooves in the courtyard. More time went by before she saw a light through the crack under her door and heard footsteps outside.

The door opened and the magician came through it, carrying a candle in an iron candlestick. When he saw Nora looking up at him, he paused. “You're awake,” he said, not sounding particularly pleased. “Did you not take the draft?” She had to concentrate to follow his words, just as with Mrs. Toristel.

“No. I want to talk to you.”

“Ah.” Putting the candle on the table, he pulled up the chair and took Nora's pulse, then probed the wrapping on her ankle. Apparently satisfied, he asked, “How are the bandages? Any leakage?” Nora shook her head. “Good. Mrs. Toristel can change your dressings tomorrow. Except—let me see to this one on your face right now.” He reached over and unfastened the bandage, pulling it carefully away from her cheek. Then he produced a small square mirror from inside his black tunic and held it at an angle, evidently using it to look at her face.

“What are you doing?” Nora asked, raising her hand.

“Don't touch your face.” From a drawer in the table he took a round clay jar and fresh bandages. He smeared something from the jar on Nora's cheek—it stung, a little—then checked the mirror again and began to fasten a new bandage, tying it around her head.

“What is the mirror for?” Nora asked.

“It's to let me see the cuts on your cheek.”

“What do you mean?”

He finished knotting the bandage. “You had a fine collection of rather powerful enchantments on yourself, as I told you once before. I've been taking them off over the past few days, a few at a time. This last spell is one of Ilissa's glamours, rather deeply ingrained by now. It's meant to modify your appearance. In addition to bringing you up to Ilissa's own standard of beauty, the spell also camouflages your wound. Hence, the mirror. This particular mirror has certain properties that allow it to reflect what the eye cannot ordinarily see.”

Nora thought about this, framing her next question. “What kinds of spells?”

Aruendiel shook his head. “The whole sorcerer's cookbook, although of course Ilissa doesn't use that kind of magic. There were several different glamours. Confusion spells, forgetfulness spells. Love spells. It looked as though she kept adding more magic, spells on top of spells, whenever she wanted to.” He added severely, “Very sloppy—I would have expected better craftsmanship from her.”

“Confusion spells?” she asked carefully, not sure that she had understood everything he had said. He nodded. “Forgetfulness spells? Love spells?” He nodded again.

That would explain a lot. That is, if there were such things as confusion spells or forgetfulness spells or love spells. “Did you take them all off?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “All except this last glamour. If you prefer to retain your current appearance, you can, although I recommend against it. You've been exposed to more than enough magic for the present. Too much enchantment sickens the body.”

“I'm still—” She stumbled and had to start again. The magician's cool gray stare didn't help her confidence. “I have trouble speaking. I can barely understand what you say.”

Aruendiel shrugged. One shoulder moved more than the other. “She put a translation spell on you, too. Otherwise you wouldn't have been able to understand her or the other Faitoren. They speak a version of our common tongue, Ors—in addition to their own language, which I'm sure Ilissa did not permit you to understand. I removed the translation spell last night.”

“We're not speaking English?” As soon as she said the word “English,” she knew it was true. Her mouth had to reshape itself to pronounce the word, which came out sounding familiar and foreign at the same time.

“No,” he said. “It's no wonder that you're having difficulty with Ors now. It's strange, in fact, that you can speak it at all. You must have picked up some knowledge of the language while you were speaking it under the spell.”

“I've always been pretty good at languages,” Nora said.

“Indeed,” he said. He sounded skeptical.

There was a long pause. Nora sighed and looked down at her bandaged body. “So I dreamed it all? It wasn't real?”

“Oh, it was real enough. It wasn't exactly as you believed it to be, though. That is Ilissa's specialty. She traffics in illusion.”

“The baby was real?”

“Yes.”

She looked up directly into his eyes. “That was a terrible thing you said to me the other night.”

Another uneven shrug. “It was true.”

“But I wanted that baby so much.”

He frowned. After a moment he said, his voice cold: “I know what it is to lose a child. But this baby would have killed you.” There was another long silence. He pushed the chair back and stood up. “Well. Shall I remove the glamour, or are you content to remain as you are?”

“Oh,” she said slowly, “take it off.”

Aruendiel touched her chin with his finger, tilting her head back slightly. It seemed to Nora that his face darkened as he watched her, but she was more interested to find that she could feel a change in herself at once. The skin of her face seemed cooler, freer, despite the bandages. “That is better,” she said.

“Good,” he said, eyes narrowed. “Now drink your sleeping draft.”

Nora raised herself on the pillow and reached for the cup with her left hand. “Is it magic?” she asked, sniffing the cup suspiciously.

“Poppy juice and honey and some herbs. No magic. Except—” He took the cup from her, held it for an instant, then gave it back to her. The cup was warm now.

For an instant the idea of drinking from it made her faintly alarmed, almost queasy, but she fought back the unease and took a sip, feeling the heat of the drink against her tongue. She shivered.

“Thank you,” she said doubtfully.

He waited until she had finished, and then took cup and candle out of the room. In the darkness, Nora listened to the magician's footsteps moving away, one foot dragging a little, and then she was asleep.

S
everal days passed quietly. The housekeeper appeared at intervals at Nora's bedside, bringing more cups of the poppy-juice draft and, after a while, small meals on a wooden tray: broth, brown bread, stewed cherries. Nora ate obediently, but without any real enthusiasm. The food felt heavy and strange in her mouth. She had to remind herself to chew and swallow it.

Mrs. Toristel volunteered little on these visits, except for some terse commentary as she changed the dressings on Nora's torso. “You were lucky these didn't go deeper. Still inflamed.”

Nora looked down incuriously. The raw red lines etched across her stomach, sewn with coarse thread, were like a map of some alien terrain. “Should I see a doctor?” A real doctor, not a magician.

Mrs. Toristel seemed faintly surprised at the notion. “There used to be a doctor in the market town, old Farcap, but he died of the dry plague two years ago.”

Afterward, alone again, Nora went over in her mind what they had said. She still found it hard to believe that she could have learned a foreign language, the tongue the magician called Ors, without knowing it. Experimentally, she spoke to Mrs. Toristel in English the next time the housekeeper came into the room, but Mrs. Toristel gave her a blank stare. She tried some of the foreign languages she knew—French, German—but the other woman shook her head. “I don't know what you're saying,” Mrs. Toristel said.

Giving up, Nora responded in the same language, the words assembling themselves slowly in her brain: “It was nothing. Never mind.”

The poppy-juice drafts were smaller now and came only once a day. When Mrs. Toristel changed her dressings again, she seemed satisfied with how the wounds were healing. “Still hurt?” she asked, applying a new bandage.

Nora's body was still sore, but the pain was duller, more familiar. “It doesn't bother me,” Nora said, truthfully enough. After that, the poppy juice stopped altogether.

Time passed more slowly. She stared at the painted walls. Someone had taken away the mirror on the opposite wall and hung a picture for her to look at: a portrait of a pretty black-haired girl in a blue dress. The style was flat, a little crude, but the painter had managed to capture something of the sitter's individuality. Her brown eyes looked into Nora's, sometimes with pity, Nora thought, sometimes with mocking amusement.

She listened to sounds from outside: the barking of dogs; the fussing of chickens; the thunk of horses' hooves; Mrs. Toristel, dry and quiet; the magician's deep tones; other people whom she could not identify. Early in the morning, when it was still gray outside, she heard owls calling. One afternoon Mrs. Toristel stood directly under Nora's window with another woman for half an hour engrossed in a disquisition on the current price and quality of flour, and Nora was hugely grateful for the diversion. The magician most often addressed his dogs, but she also heard him calling for Mrs. Toristel or her husband, who seemed to be in charge of the stables.

Nora had not seen Aruendiel since the night when he had rebandaged her face, which was something of a relief. Whenever she thought of how he had taken the cup into his hand and given it back to her steaming hot, she felt uncomfortable. The quick, casual gesture, replayed in her mind, frightened her because she understood only that it was impossible. Then there was her flight through the air, also hard to explain. In fact, her mind shied away from even trying. Either there was a rational explanation—or not, Nora thought.

Remembering the poppy juice, she had a refreshing inspiration. She had emptied some dull opiate to the drains, had she not? And dreamed a storybook world for herself. Flying through the air—a hallucination. So was the monster that attacked her. The man she had married. Ilissa, and all those strange, beautiful people. The wonderful clothes. Having a baby. Some element of wish fulfillment fueling the fantasies, probably. (How pathetic was that?)

At the thought of the baby, though, she felt sadness deep within her body, like the slow fatigue of illness. There was no baby, it was just a dream, Nora thought resolutely, but her flesh said otherwise. Then there was the gold ring on her left hand. Still, what did a ring prove, one way or the other? She tried to pull it off with her other, bandaged hand, but she couldn't get a good grip, and the ring refused to budge.

She found herself unexpectedly slipping into long crying jags. One day Mrs. Toristel, passing outside the door, came in to see what was wrong. Nora only shook her head mutely, overwhelmed at the idea of even trying to explain. Then she noticed what Mrs. Toristel was carrying.

“Oh, you have some books!” she said, sniffling, sitting up. “May I see them?”

“Oh, no, they're the master's—” Mrs. Toristel said, but Nora had already taken a book out of the housekeeper's hands. It was a small leather-bound volume, the covers embossed with two dragons facing each other across an oval seal. Sitting upright on their hind legs, they resembled two small dogs begging for scraps.

Nora leafed through the book greedily. Strings of elegant brushstrokes climbed the pages, an unknown alphabet that made as much sense to her as a handful of broken twigs. “Another one?” she asked. After a second's hesitation, Mrs. Toristel opened up a second volume, holding it out of Nora's reach. The same as the first book, except this one was printed, the cryptic letters roughly carved into woodblock.

“This is Ors?” Nora demanded. Mrs. Toristel nodded, frowning. “I can't read it. I can't read at all,” Nora said. “I'm illiterate.” She began to laugh, then to weep again.

Later the same afternoon, Mrs. Toristel came back with some clothes and spread them out on the bed for Nora to see. A pair of jeans, a T-shirt, some underclothing. “Losi in the village, that does the wash, she had quite a scare.” The housekeeper's tone was faintly accusatory. “I gave her what you were wearing when you came, a nightie. Losi said she put it to soak and when she came back, it had changed into these things.”

Nora recognized her Eno River festival T-shirt. “How did these get here? I wasn't wearing them when I came.”

“No, you wore a nightie. Silk, with little pearls. Losi said to me, ‘I hope you don't think I stole that nightie, ma'am. I swear I didn't. I didn't leave it for five minutes, and it was gone and these other clothes were in its place.' She felt terrible, she knew that nightie was valuable, but the master said it was nothing she did, the clothes must have changed back when he took those spells off you.”

“What does he mean? That my nightgown was really jeans and a T-shirt?” The same jeans and T-shirt that Nora had put on that far-off morning in the mountain cabin, just before she went walking in the woods and met Ilissa.

Mrs. Toristel shrugged. “You look different now than when you came. It's the same with your clothes, I expect.”

“How do I look different?” Nora asked quickly.

“Well, your hair. It was yellow when you came. Now it's brown, mostly. Still yellow at the ends.”

Most of Nora's hair was bound to her head by the bandages on her face. Now she pulled a thick strand loose. The hair fell past her shoulders. “It's gotten so long,” she said, surprised. “Could I have a mirror? There was one in this room before, where that portrait is now.”

“That portrait? I didn't take away the mirror,” the other woman said, looking puzzled. “You can't see much of your face anyway, with all those bandages.”

And under the bandages? “Mrs. Toristel, these cuts, how bad are they?”

“They're healing nicely,” she said. “And they'll heal faster if you don't worry yourself sick about them. Anyway, I thought you'd want to know what happened to your clothes. Losi worked hard to get them clean. They were very dirty,” she said with a sniff, “in addition to all the bloodstains. She mended the rips, too.”

After Mrs. Toristel was gone, Nora spent a long time turning the clothes over in her lap. Yes, Losi had done a good job. Surely no one had ever mended a T-shirt with such care. Nora spread her fingers into a claw and placed her hand over the places that had been torn. Her hand was too small to cover them. There were more of Losi's neat stitches along the inside seams of the jeans. At some point, someone must have ripped out those seams. Were they too snug to accommodate an expanding belly?

If the magician was right, she had been wearing the same jeans and T-shirt for months. Ilissa had simply recycled them into dozens of delectable, extravagant outfits, one after another.

Or, Nora thought—getting a grip on herself—wasn't it more logical to assume that she had simply been wearing jeans and a T-shirt when she arrived here, at this place? She'd had an accident on the mountain. Now she was recuperating in a hospital or rehab facility. The man she'd imagined was a magician was really a doctor; Mrs. Toristel was a nurse. Brain damage would explain why she couldn't read, why she had trouble understanding speech; the whole idea of this foreign language, Ors, might be a self-protective fantasy she'd contrived to shield herself from knowledge of her new limitations.

Why this particular fantasy? Nora wondered. She had never much cared for fiction in the swords and sorcerers vein. When she'd had to read
Lord of the Rings
for Goldstein's Modern Myths, she thought it was a bad joke, some of Tolkien's falsely archaic language was so painful to read. A flash of bittersweet memory: EJ playing Dungeons and Dragons in the den on Saturday nights with his friends, a bunch of guys huddled around the coffee table, utterly absorbed. All geeks—Nora could tell, even at twelve—though some of them were cute and didn't know it. D&D was the one interest of EJ's that she couldn't get. That and physics. Maybe, she thought clinically, her injured brain had hurled her into this magical, medieval-style hallucination as a long-delayed expression of grief for her dead brother. But in that case, wouldn't she have come across EJ himself by now?

I wish I were in a fantasy with real bathrooms, at least, she thought. Even Ilissa had indoor plumbing.

She looked closely at Mrs. Toristel the next time the older woman came into the room, trying to see the nurse within. It was not easy. Mrs. Toristel was old for a nurse, stiff in the joints, with the kind of yellowish gray hair that meant she'd once been a redhead. As hard as Nora stared, the housekeeper's ankle-length dress refused to resolve into a nurse's scrubs. When Nora asked her directly whether this place was really a hospital, the woman looked at her incredulously. “Nothing like that around here. I never heard of such a thing.”

“You'd think they'd be encouraging me to abandon this fantasy, wouldn't you?” Nora demanded of the girl in the portrait, after the door closed behind Mrs. Toristel. The black-haired girl's half smile was especially mocking today. “Maybe you're not real, either,” Nora continued, switching into English. “You don't look like something that would be hanging in a hospital room. Or maybe you are a mirror, but my mind won't admit it because I'm afraid to look at my scarred face.”

It was late afternoon, and sunlight streamed through the window's thick panes, throwing a bath of light on the wall where the portrait hung. And the portrait in turn reflected an oblong of light onto the ceiling.

But the picture was unglazed, Nora noticed; there was no glass in the ornate black frame. She watched the patch of reflected light until the sun moved on and it faded.

When Mrs. Toristel came in that evening, bearing a tray of food, Nora was ready. “Where am I?” she asked. “I mean, what is the name of this place, this area?”

Mrs. Toristel pursed her thin lips as she settled the tray of soup and brown bread on Nora's lap. It seemed to be a question that she hadn't considered previously. “When I lived in Pelagnia as a girl, we called this the Northlands,” she said finally. “But that would mean a very large territory, from the sea all the way to the Ice. Right around here, they call this area the Uland, after the river Uel. Most of the master's lands fall inside the Uland.”

None of these names meant anything to Nora. “What cities are near here?”

That was Red Gate, the market town, Mrs. Toristel said. Three hours away on foot. Barsy, where her daughter lived, and Stone Top, the next market town. “I don't know what comes after that,” she added. “I haven't traveled beyond Barsy myself since coming to live here. The king's seat is at Semr, but that's a long way away. Several days on horseback.”

“There's no king,” said Nora. She now felt on solid ground. “There's no king, I bet there are no towns called Barsy or Stone Top or Red Gate, and I don't think that man Aruendiel can do magic. This is all bullshit.” Apparently the word for bullshit was a lot worse in Ors than in English, because Mrs. Toristel looked genuinely shocked. But then there was no such language as Ors, Nora reminded herself. “Can't you just tell me the truth?” she went on. “Where are we? How do I get to I-40 from here? Or Asheville?”

But Mrs. Toristel disclaimed all knowledge of I-40 or Asheville or—upon further questioning—even the United States of America.

“You're lying or you're crazy, then,” said Nora. “Or maybe you don't know anything about geography. Maybe you really believe there's a king, or that your precious master is a magician. I don't have to believe it, though.”

“You should calm down.”

“I'm sorry, you've been kind to me, and I don't mean to insult you. But this is all insane.”

Mrs. Toristel said nothing, the wrinkles around her eyes deepening as she looked at Nora.

“I want to go home!” Nora cried out. “Where things are real, where they don't change. Nightgowns don't turn into jeans, or—look,” she added, pointing. “That picture on the wall, it's not a picture. It's a mirror. I'll prove it.” Picking up the spoon, she aimed it at the portrait and sent it spinning through the air. There was the sound of breaking glass, and a web of black cracks shot across the girl's pale, fine-boned face. A triangular shard containing most of the girl's left shoulder fell to the floor.