The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic (14 page)

“That was his jest. Although, it's true, the villagers would not think it funny.”

Actually, there seemed to be surprisingly little magic in daily use in the magician's household. “Why doesn't he actually do something useful with his magic?” Nora asked. “Why do
you
have to do any work? Why doesn't he just do some magic and poof, the castle would be clean?”

“He would love that as much as killing grasshoppers. Now that you say it, I do remember, when I first went to work for him, I thought it would be an easy berth, with him being a magician. I thought there'd be all kinds of, oh, spirits and demons to do the hard jobs, or maybe I'd learn some spells and my work would be done. It wasn't that way at all. Same old sweeping and scrubbing as at home. But there was a bigger staff in those days, at Lusul.”

Maggie, I guess I'll tell you more about Aruendiel later. I've been spending most of my time with the housekeeper, Mrs. Toristel. We had a rocky start, but now we get along okay.

You did tell me that I should go back to cooking.

True, Mrs. Toristel had looked a shade alarmed the first time she came into the kitchen and found Nora holding a knife, slicing plums. With a deliberate movement—hoping to impress the housekeeper with her sanity—Nora put the knife down and said mildly that she had smelled the vinegar syrup on the stove and seen the baskets of fruit on the table, only some of it peeled and sliced, and would it be all right if she helped make the preserves?

Mrs. Toristel watched Nora closely at first and did not hesitate to offer precise directions on how plum skins should be removed, but by the end of the afternoon she had unbent enough to fill Nora in on the state of Mr. Toristel's rheumatism, the two or three most misguided ways of making preserves, and Morinen's prospects of marrying the blacksmith. (Poor, according to Mrs. Toristel. The miller's daughter had her eye on him, too.)

“You're not slow with the knife,” Mrs. Toristel said, with approval. “You must have done this kind of work before.”

A whole set of questions was folded into that statement. “I worked as a cook, a couple of years ago,” Nora said. “Before I was, um, a fairy princess.”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Toristel, as though this were a well-established career progression. “Well, I can always do with some help in the kitchen. As long as you don't strain yourself, now,” she added severely. “I don't want
him
blaming me if your leg won't heal properly.”

It was clear who
him
was. Nora remembered the way the English department secretary always referred to the department chair simply as “she”: “Oh, hello. You'll have to wait. She's running a little behind.”

And I'm back to the magician again, Nora thought, twisting a stubborn root out of the earth.

I still don't know much about Aruendiel—Lord Aruendiel. Mrs. Toristel has told me a little. No family. A widower. I'm not sure how old he is. She's worked for him her whole life, I gather.

Morinen would never have lasted a day at Lusul, she was a good-hearted girl, but far too careless, Mrs. Toristel observed irritably one day, after Morinen let the bread burn.

“What's Lusul? A city?” Nora asked. She had heard Mrs. Toristel mention the name before.

“Lusul was his estate,” Mrs. Toristel corrected her. “Very grand it was, with good farms all around, not like this place. Plenty of staff to keep it up. My job was to keep the fires going and the rooms swept and dusted in just one wing of the house. There was another girl for the other wing, and another for the bedrooms. And I had to keep all the vases filled with fresh flowers. Her ladyship was so fond of flowers. That was the first magic I ever saw his lordship do, growing roses and such in the middle of winter.” Mrs. Toristel's wrinkled face brightened. Nora asked how she got the job. “Ah, that was a kindness of his lordship and his wife's. My father had died, and I was the oldest, twelve. We had an old connection with his lordship's family, and when we heard that he would be getting married and living at Lusul, my mother wrote to him and asked if there might be a place for me in the household.

“Well, she didn't write to him,” Mrs. Toristel corrected herself. “She had one of our neighbors, who was in trade, write to him and read the letter to her when it came back. It was her ladyship who wrote back to say yes. I said to my mother how funny it was to think of a woman writing a letter, but she said that great ladies learned how to read and write, some of them.”

Nora couldn't help saying that she could read and write, but Mrs. Toristel only looked sharply at her. “When I showed you those books, you said you couldn't read them.”

“I can read perfectly well in my own language. I've spent years in school, in fact.”

“I thought you said you'd been a cook.”

“I've done that, too.”

“Well, I know how to read, too, a bit,” Mrs. Toristel said with a sniff. “The master taught me, so that I could keep the accounts for him. But there's no call to read or write unless you're a magician or a lawyer or a merchant, maybe.”

Job opportunities for English professors: zero. What did it signify, Nora reflected grimly, that she would wind up in a place—real or imagined—where she could not practice the occupation for which she had spent years preparing? But something else that Mrs. Toristel said had caught her attention. “So his wife—the Lady Aruendiel—”

“Lady Lusarniev Aruendielan.” Mrs. Toristel embarked on a brief explanation of family names and titles among the aristocracy. “All right, I see,” Nora said when the other woman was finished. “What of her? Is she—” She paused politely, but with something wriggling urgently at the back of her memory. Something she'd heard back in that hazy time among the Faitoren.

“Ah, well,” Mrs. Toristel said, a little stiffly, “sad to say, their marriage didn't last long.” Nora looked at her inquisitively, but Mrs. Toristel pressed her lips together, as though to keep the answer from tumbling out. “I don't like to gossip about his lordship's private affairs.”

“Oh, no, of course not,” said Nora.

“It's not what he pays me for.”

“Certainly not.”

“There are some who'd tell you all kinds of terrible stories about him.”

“That's too bad,” Nora said sympathetically. “Of course, if there are terrible rumors out there, it's good to know the truth.”

“Well, all I'll say,” said Mrs. Toristel with a nod, “is that some people take their marriage vows less seriously than others. It causes a lot of heartache, but that's the way of the world.”

“I know it,” Nora said. She pulled at the ring on her finger, as she had gotten into the habit of doing. As usual, it stayed put—this was starting to be seriously annoying. “So he—?”

“No,
she,
” Mrs. Toristel corrected. “Devastated, he was. He came home and she wasn't there. Gone. Off with another man. One of his closest friends.

“I remember how his lordship walked into the house that day, never suspecting a thing. He'd been in Semr, I think, at court. The other servants made themselves scarce. No one wanted to tell him she was gone.

“I didn't know any better. I was just a child myself, and I didn't quite realize what it meant, that Lady Lusarniev had ridden away the day before with that young man. Oh, I knew it wasn't quite right, but I couldn't believe that her ladyship might be unfaithful to
him
.” She lowered her voice slightly. “To such a famous magician. Think about it. How would you even hope to keep something like that a secret?”

“She did, evidently,” Nora observed.

Mrs. Toristel nodded. “Lord Aruendiel asked if I'd seen her ladyship and when I told him that she had gone away with the knight, his own friend, I saw his face change. I saw the anger building in his eyes—oh, I never want to see that again. I'd been dusting the woodwork, and it came to me that he would turn me into dust, too. But he just said, very courteously, ‘Thank you, Ulunip,' and then he left the room.”

“Ulunip?”

“That's my given name,” Mrs. Toristel said. “A good Pelagnian name. It means ‘Little Rabbit.' You don't hear it around here very much.”

“Then what happened?”

“There's not much to say. He left Lusul that day, and I don't believe he ever went back.”

“Did he go after his wife?'

“All I know is that he left, the estate was closed up a few months later, and I lost my job there. We heard he'd gone into the wars. There were all kinds of dreadful rumors floating around—that she was killed, he was killed—but when he asked me to come work for him here, it was obvious that he wasn't dead, even if he'd been terribly injured in the war. I never put much stock in rumors.”

“But what did happen to his wife? Maybe she actually was”—Nora cleared her throat—“dead.”

“Well, yes, she went to the gods, poor lady. He told me that when I arrived here, the first day. I could tell he didn't want to say anything more, so I didn't ask. It was none of my business, anyway.”

“Still, I would think you'd want to know what happened to her. For your own peace of mind.”

“That's what Toristel said. He wasn't happy to come here at first. He was like you, mistrustful of the magic, and he'd heard those stories about the master. But I told Toristel,” she added with a dry chuckle, “that I'd be perfectly safe as long as I didn't marry his lordship and then run away with someone else. Toristel had to admit there was small chance of that, since I was already married to him.

“We didn't have much choice but to come here, anyway. My daughter was on the way, and there was no work for us near Lusul. People held it against me that I'd told his lordship about his wife leaving. As though he wouldn't have found the truth in the end, anyway. This place seemed like the end of the earth after Lusul, and the winters are terrible, but you can get used to anything.”

“And he never married again?”

Mrs. Toristel seemed surprised at the suggestion. “Oh, no.”

“It's a sad story,” Nora said.

“Yes, well, it's an old story now. But I'm telling you this because you might hear worse from others, and you should know the truth.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Oh, it's been many, many years.”

“How many?” Nora asked, doing the arithmetic in her head. Mrs. Toristel couldn't be younger than sixty, surely. Sixty-something minus twelve? Surely not. But the housekeeper confirmed it: “It must be four dozen years or more. Yes, I married Toristel four years later, and we've been married forty-seven years.”

“So, fifty-one years ago this happened? How old is
he
?” Maybe the magician had married very young. She made a hesitant guess: “Seventy?”

Mrs. Toristel gave a gentle snort and shook her head. “Seventy? Ah, he's older than you'd think.”

“Eighty? No. Impossible.” Nora was incredulous. “He looks old, but not that old.” The housekeeper only smiled. “Is this more magic?” Nora demanded.

“What do you think?” Mrs. Toristel said.

I think something very, very bad happened to Mrs. Aruendiel, Maggie. But maybe I'm projecting.

I should have told you this before:
I
got married. Before I came to this place. It was a disaster. My husband cheated on me and almost killed me. I left as soon as I came to my senses.

Some other things happened, but I don't want to talk about them right now.

One of the village women was heavily pregnant, and every time Nora saw her, her round belly drew Nora's eyes like the moon. That could have been me, Nora thought wonderingly. By now, she estimated, she would have been maybe seven months along, big and slow, no doubt getting tired of being pregnant but quietly happy, feeling the baby grow stronger—

“Enough,” Nora told herself severely, but it was useless, she couldn't stop thinking about it. She missed the child she might have had with a longing that she could not put a shape to, even if there was a horrific suspicion lurking in the back of her mind that the baby was not exactly a baby, just as its father was not exactly a man. What she also missed, she realized now, was the baby's mother, the hopeful, joyful—deluded—Nora who was now a phantom, too.

“It came too soon,” Mrs. Toristel said with a sigh, when Nora ventured to ask her about the baby one day as they were packing dried plums into boxes. “There was nothing to be done. He told me the next day, after he stayed up with you.”

“He told me that it was a good thing that the baby was gone. A good thing.” Nora paused. “Was there something wrong with it?”

“You were lucky to live, that's all I know. Take this from someone who lost two of her own before they were born. Some things weren't meant to be. This batch is all wormy, Nora, didn't you notice when you were sorting it?”

Deciding what next to tell Maggie, Nora found that her eyes were wet. She squeezed her lids shut and felt the tears burn.

I'm depressed a lot, yeah. But there's a lot to be depressed about.

I try to keep busy and be useful, and I've learned how to do things like milking cows and goats. Cooking on a woodstove. I get distracted for a while, and sometimes I'm kind of proud of just surviving in this place.

Then I think, What am I doing here? Nothing I've done in my entire life matters now.

I mean, yes, I was having problems in grad school—but when I think I'll never have the chance to even try to finish my Ph.D., it just feels hopeless. Like I'm trapped.

And I miss—well, everyone in my life. Maybe not Adam. But everyone else. Even Naomi. It's still sinking in, that I might not see you or my parents or my sisters or anyone else again. I remember that awful night, the party after the rehearsal dinner, wishing my life were different. I didn't mean like this.