The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic (26 page)

“No.” He sounded grim. After a moment, he added, “It was only later that we realized how many young women had disappeared in the vicinity of the Faitoren, and discerned what was happening to them.”

“How many—?”

“I could not tell you.”

They rode on for a while in silence, and then Aruendiel asked brusquely, “How did you know that Ilissa had been my mistress?”

Nora tried to untangle the threads of her intuition. “Because you two hate each other so much! And you talk about her as though you knew her well. Also, something she said to you in Semr made me wonder.”

“Indeed.” He did not seem pleased by her deduction. “I thought that Ilissa might have told you. Or that you had heard some old gossip floating around in Semr.”

“No, I didn't hear
that
in Semr,” Nora said, and then regretted it.

“Ah, what did you hear?” he inquired. When she did not reply at once, he laughed sardonically. “I suppose they told you all kinds of interesting things. People love to gossip about magicians.”

“They said you killed your wife,” Nora said, surprising herself, the words slipping out of her mouth as swiftly as an arrow.

Aruendiel's face hardened. “Well, I did. So the fools have a good story to pass along to other fools.”

There was nothing graceful to say at this juncture, so again Nora said the first thing that rose to her lips. “Why?” Even if she knew the answer already, she did not understand it. No matter how awful Adam had been, Nora had never thought about killing him.

“Did they not tell you in Semr?” he asked.

She dropped her eyes to the back of her horse's head. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I don't mean to pry.”

“But you are prying,” he said. “We have wasted enough time today discussing my biography.”

He spurred his horse ahead and vanished around a bend in the road. Did he mean to abandon her? Nora cautiously urged her horse to a faster gait, but for the rest of the afternoon, he was in sight only occasionally, when the road straightened for a stretch.

They spent the night with one of Aruendiel's friends, a magician named Nansis Abora, who lived in a tidy cottage surrounded by vegetable plots. He had disheveled gray hair and a faint stutter. That night she lay in bed in a slant-ceilinged loft over the kitchen and listened to the two magicians talk late into the night, mostly about Nansis Abora's recent work on various problems in time-travel magic. It sounded like a fairly abstruse branch of magic because of the complicated astronomical calculations involved; she wondered sourly if Aruendiel was really following the other magician's explanation. In the morning she was so sore from the ride of the day before that she could hardly climb down the ladder from the loft, let alone mount her horse. Nansis Abora insisted on doing a spell to relieve the pain, for which she was very grateful. Aruendiel had not offered to help.

He was in a better mood, though, as they set out. At least, he stayed within view. From time to time, he pointed out a castle that he had once helped capture or made an acid observation about the condition of a farmer's livestock. By the end of the day she had learned nothing more about magic, but had picked up a few tips about siegecraft and animal husbandry that, she supposed, might prove useful someday.

On the second evening, Aruendiel arranged lodgings at a farmhouse, paying the young farmer with a silver bead and magic: spells to keep the rain out of the thatch, cure a toothache, and sweeten the well water. Nora awoke once during the night and saw, in the moonlight, that the space in front of the hearth where Aruendiel had been sleeping was vacant. She lay awake on her pallet for some time, wondering what she would do now that he had abandoned her after all. But in the morning he was lying there as though he had never stirred, his long limbs looking somehow askew even under the folds of his cloak.

As they were preparing to leave, she asked Aruendiel how much farther they had to go. About a dozen
karistises
, he said. She pressed him to put it in terms that she could understand. “We could be home by late tonight,” he said, “if the roads are not too bad, and if you are not as slow as you were the first day.”

“I could go faster if I didn't have to ride sidesaddle,” Nora said. “It's ridiculous to make women balance sideways.” As though horses weren't huge and terrifying enough already.

She expected a caustic remark on her ignorance of social niceties, but to her surprise, Aruendiel smiled fractionally. “I agree with you. Women had a little more sense when I was younger. My mother never rode sidesaddle in her life.”

“Really?” Nora said, taken aback. Of course Aruendiel had had a mother, but it was odd to contemplate. “When did they start riding sidesaddle?”

“It was one of those crazes that start in the cities. It came in with the modern fashion for long skirts.”

Intrigued, Nora almost asked him for more details about this piece of fashion history, but thought better of it. “If I had the right kind of saddle,” she pointed out, “I could ride astride, and we could make better time.” Without answering, he heaved his own saddle onto his horse's back and tightened the cinch under the horse's belly. “Or would it be too unseemly for me to ride astride?” she asked sharply.

With a grunt, Aruendiel lifted her saddle from the fence. “There is nothing seemly about a bad rider,” he said. “You sit on the horse as though you're made of wood. I once turned the Forest of Nevreng into cavalry for the count of Middle Duxirent. They rode much as you do.”

“Well, they didn't have to ride sidesaddle, did—oh!” She had just noticed the saddle's transformation. “Thank you! I don't suppose you could shorten my skirt, too?”

“I am no tailor,” he said, frowning. “Rip the side seams out if you must.”

Riding astride on the transformed saddle, Nora did not exactly feel as though she and the horse were one, but at least they seemed to be more or less on the same team. It was easier to keep pace with Aruendiel. “There's something I don't understand,” she said to him. “Why can't you just use your magic to wish us home? Hirizjahkinis moved the whole court to her country the other night and back again. Why can't you do the same?”

“That was a temporary dislocation spell—and the Kavareen had much to do with it, if I'm not mistaken,” he said in a disapproving tone. “She is becoming far too dependent on that creature.”

“All right, but why can't you do, um, a permanent dislocation spell, without the Kavareen?”

“Would you like me to summon up the winds to blow you to my castle, the way they took you from Ilissa's castle?”

“No,” Nora said definitely. “That was enough excitement for one lifetime. But here's the real question. Why don't you use magic more often? Last night you could have changed, oh, a spoon or something into a bed for yourself, instead of sleeping on the floor. Or why even pay the farmer for a night's lodging? You could have made him believe that you paid him, I'm sure.”

“Ah!” The question seemed to stir up a mixture of disdain and interest in Aruendiel. “The wizard Po Luin, when he traveled, used to construct a new city every night and then dismantle it in the morning. He used pebbles and twigs for the buildings, ants or field mice for the people. He disliked the country intensely; he found it dull.”

Nora wondered how interesting a city of former ants could be. But she said: “Why not do something like that? Everyday life is hard here, much harder than in my world. Why not use magic to make things easier?”

“Ilissa asked me a similar question once.”

Nora ignored the implied reproach. “What did you tell her?”

“I told her that magic was not a plaything. She found that very amusing.” He rode along for a few moments before speaking again. “I have been in worlds where people use almost no magic, like your own, and worlds where they use magic for almost everything. The Faitoren must have come from a place like the latter, originally. They cosset themselves with magic, and well, you see the result. It's a pretty life, but none of it is real.

“Also,” Aruendiel added, his voice quickening with irritation, “it would be dishonorable to use magic to cheat a peasant.”

“I wasn't seriously suggesting that.”

“I hope not.”

Another few minutes of silence, until Nora said: “Hirizjahkinis said that you taught her how to be a magician.”

“Yes. She was an excellent pupil.”

Before she could lose her nerve, Nora asked: “Will you teach me? I'd like to learn how—how to be a magician.”

The question amused him more than she would have liked. “A doubtful prospect. Very few are suited to become magicians.”

“What does it take?”

“Years of study and practice. But first one must know what magic is.”

The road dipped, and they splashed across a stream. “Well, what is magic? Do you command spirits, like Prospero? Did you sell your soul to the devil, like Faustus?”

Aruendiel wanted to know who Prospero and Faustus were. She tried to explain: “Magicians from stories in my world. Written, oh, some four hundred years ago.” She had never thought about it before, but surely the Elizabethans were almost the last to use magic as a plot device in serious literature. After Cervantes, the enchanters were living on borrowed time. “Prospero has a couple of magical servants,” she went on, “the most powerful being a spirit, Ariel, who can do things like raise storms and tread the ooze of the salt deep. Faustus makes a deal with the devil to acquire magical powers, but in the end he goes to hell, if you know what that is.”

“I do not command spirits,” Aruendiel said, with asperity. “It's true, there is magic that is based on enslaving demons and spirits of various kinds, and I have studied it, but it is not the kind of magic that I practice now.”

“Well, then, what is magic? The kind that you practice now?”

He gave her a penetrating look. “Once you have worked magic, then you start to understand it.”

“That seems a bit circular,” Nora objected. Aruendiel's only response was an impatient tilt of the head. “All right, I see,” she said. “If you have to ask, you'll never know.”

He seemed struck by the sentiment. “That is well put.”

“Thanks, but I didn't think of it myself,” Nora said.

T
he countryside took on a different character when they left the lowlands around Semr. The road dwindled to a muddy track that snaked around wooded hills scabbed with bare black rock. Aruendiel said that once they crossed the Trollsblade Hills, they would enter the basin of the river Uel, which would bring them into his own lands. Nora asked, as a joke, whether there were any trolls in the area, and Aruendiel said no, not for at least two hundred years. She registered the stippling of yellow in the leaves of the trees, and was just wondering if the winters here would be as bad as Hirizjahkinis had warned, when they came into yet another tiny village.

This one seemed unusually lively. A crowd of at least fifty people were gathered around a wooden framework in the village square. As Nora and Aruendiel rode closer, Nora figured out what the frame was for. A rope dangled from the top beam. The prisoner crouched at the foot of the gibbet, bound with ropes.

“They are having some sport,” Aruendiel said, spurring his horse forward. When Nora caught up, he was already talking to a man in brown with a small, tight-featured face like a pebble. The village headman, Nora gathered as she listened.

He gave short, reluctant answers to Aruendiel's questions. The prisoner had been condemned to death for murder. A little girl, missing three days. No, they hadn't waited for the magistrate.

“This village is the possession of Lord Olven Obardies, is it not?” Aruendiel asked. “Lord Olven is my vassal; I am Lord Aruendiel of the Uland. He would not be pleased to have one of his peasants put to death without proper authority.”

“The bastard confessed already, your lordship. And it's good riddance. No kids are safe around him.”

“Yes,” said Aruendiel, glancing at the prisoner huddled beside the gibbet. “I see he lost a hand. The left hand, so it was not theft.”

“We caught him pawing a boy, two years since. We should have hung him then.”

“Remarkable that he managed to kill a child with only one hand,” Aruendiel observed. “How did he kill her, by the way?”

“We can't say,” said the headman, a note of exasperation entering his voice. “We can't find her body, and the maggot won't tell us.”

“You have not loosened his tongue enough.”

“We've tried, your lordship. The stones and irons both. But she wasn't either of the places he said. We thought we'd have another go with the irons before we hang him.”

“Leave him to me,” said Aruendiel. “It's my right and obligation to examine him, and he will not lie to me.”

The man in brown looked thoughtfully at the prisoner, then back to Aruendiel. “They say you're a wizard, as well as a lord. You have spells to make him talk?”

“A magician. I have spells that will pluck the truth from him as fast as the ravens pluck the flesh from a hanged man's carcass.”

The man in brown seemed pleased by the simile. He nodded at the two men who stood guard over the bound man. They yanked the prisoner to his feet, his face brocaded with blood and dirt, as Aruendiel slid off his horse. He studied the man for an instant, then touched his forehead.

The prisoner jerked back as though he had been burned. He screamed once and fell to his knees, heaving for air, pawing uselessly at his throat with the stump of his unbound arm. Interested, the crowd pressed closer. Nora looked away, then back again in time to see a new, bright stream of blood trickling from the prisoner's nose.

Enough, Nora said to herself. Over the heads of the crowd, she called out to Aruendiel to stop, then realized that she was speaking English. Even when she switched to Ors, Aruendiel gave no sign of hearing her. The people around her did, though; she was collecting unfriendly looks.

Suddenly the prisoner broke into speech. “No,” he howled. “No. I didn't.” Another scream, and then, more clearly: “No, I didn't kill her. I went to the house because I was hungry. I thought Massy would give me something to eat. The little girl wasn't even there.”

“He's lying, the bastard,” someone else said. Angry cries of assent rose from the crowd.

“He's gone back on his story,” said the man in brown, in deep frustration. “I thought you said you'd get the truth out of him.”

“He's telling the truth,” Aruendiel said. “He lied to you before, when he said that he killed her. He did not kill her, and he does not know who did. You can let him go.”

The two men on either side of the prisoner looked from Aruendiel to the headman and back again.

“I said—” Aruendiel began.

The man in brown evidently came to the end of a quick calculation. “Let him go, boys,” he said. “You heard his lordship. Let the sheepfucker go. He didn't kill the little girl, his lordship says. His lordship's magic says.”

The guards began to untie the prisoner's bonds. Discontent buzzed through the crowd.

“We don't know who did kill the little girl, your lordship,” the headman said. “Now that you've told us who didn't kill her.”

“Where did she live?” Aruendiel asked.

•   •   •

The house was smaller than most of the others in the village, a one-room wooden hut in a yard of brown dust. An ancient apple tree grew by the front door, bare and dead except for one last green limb. As they approached the house, a middle-aged man stood up uncertainly from where he had been lying in the meager shade of the tree, and called out something unintelligible.

“Too drunk to go see his own daughter's killer hanged,” said the headman disgustedly.

The girl's mother led them into the house. She had been standing next to the gibbet, Nora recalled, a slight woman in a black shawl. The headman called her Massy. Along one wall was a fieldstone hearth; on the other side of the room, a rough bedstead and a pile of straw, covered by a blanket. A trio of low stools stood in the middle of the dirt floor.

Aruendiel prowled around the room, peering into earthenware crocks, sifting the hearth ashes through his long fingers, while a group of children straggled into the hut. The missing child's siblings, evidently: a boy around six, two smaller girls, and a half-naked toddler. The children milled about with a shy restlessness. Massy wrapped her arms protectively around the boy's shoulders until Aruendiel told her to sit down. “When did you last see the child?” he asked.

There was a hesitant, almost grudging tone in Massy's voice as she answered, but slowly the story emerged. The girl, Irseln, had been feeling poorly that day. A stomachache. She had stayed inside the house while the other children went out to play. Massy had been doing the wash. Coming back from the well with a load of water, she had seen Short Bernl behind the hut, near the shed. She didn't like seeing him there. Everyone knew Short Bernl was filth. She asked him to leave. After he left, she did the wash in the yard. Only then did she go inside and see that Irseln was missing. At first she thought that the girl must have felt better and gone out to play. But when the other children came home, Irseln was not with them. Massy gave them supper and went out to find the child. There was no answer to her shouts.

“Where was your husband during all this?”

He got home late that night and went right to sleep, Massy said. “Fat Tod and Pirix say he was with them all day,” interjected the headman. “Helped them take some goats to market and then drink up the proceeds.”

The next day, presumably more sober, Irseln's father had found bloodstains inside the shed.

“I see,” said Aruendiel. He looked at the children clustered around their mother. “Mistress Nora,” he said sharply, “take the children out of here.”

“Me?” said Nora, disappointed. She had been following Massy's story with close attention. “Take them where?”

“Anywhere—but well away from here.”

Massy looked as though she would like to protest, but said nothing. With some difficulty, Nora managed to herd the children out of the house, carrying the toddler in her arms. The older boy stood defiantly beside his mother until she told him in a low voice to go look after his sisters.

Behind the hut was a small clearing with the remains of a vegetable garden, a tangle of thirsty, yellowing leaves and vines. To one side was the shed that she had already heard so much about, a small, fragile structure of weather-roughened boards.

“Irseln got killed there,” said the older girl, pointing at it. “Want to see the blood?”

“No,” said Nora untruthfully. “Also, I don't think we should disturb your father.” He was slumped against the side of the shed, snoring gently. Man and building seemed to be propping each other up.

“He's not my father,” said the boy contemptuously, tossing his hair out of his eyes.

“That Irseln pa,” said the smaller girl.

Nora looked at the children more closely. It was true that none of them bore much resemblance to the heavy-framed sleeping man; they were all fine-boned and slender, like their mother. Painfully thin, in fact, like a family of young sparrows. “Where's your father, then?” Nora asked.

“Our father's dead,” said the boy. “We used to have a bigger house, and chickens. Then Ma married Rorpin,” he said, looking at the sleeping man with distaste. “He drinks all the time. He's been drunk ever since Irseln got killed.”

“Maybe he misses her,” Nora said.

“Maybe,” the boy allowed. “No one else misses her.”

“Why not?” Nora asked.

The boy shrugged. “She cried and complained all the time. She didn't like us. We didn't like her.”

“She hit me,” said the older girl. “She hit me a lot. And Gissy, too.”

“Irseln hit me,” said the smaller girl, rather proudly.

“Ma said her pa spoiled her. Irseln wouldn't do what my ma said, ever,” said the older girl self-righteously. “Is that man in there really a wizard?”

“Yes,” said Nora.

“Is he going to do magic?”

“Probably.”

“Can we watch?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“He doesn't want to be disturbed,” Nora said. “Where were you playing the day Irseln was killed?”

“Down in the meadow.” The girl indicated a path leading through the trees.

“Will you show me?”

“I guess so. Have you seen him do magic before?”

“Yes. A couple of times.”

“Like what? Can he turn things into gold?”

“Can he talk to animals?”

“Can he fly?”

Keeping small children entertained becomes much easier if one has spent some time in the company of a practicing magician, Nora discovered. Even a spare, relatively unemotional account of how Aruendiel had arranged her escape from the Faitoren held the children's attention on the way to the meadow. Along the way she learned that the boy was named Horl, the two girls were Sova and Gissy, the wooden spoon that Sova clutched was actually a doll named Princess Butter, and no one seemed to call the toddler anything but the baby.

The children began a rambling, unstructured game of tag, all of them chasing one another around the meadow, except for the baby, who functioned as home base. It was a good game for unsupervised kids, Nora thought, because it meant that someone was always running after the toddler. She could not quite rid herself of the faint apprehension that Irseln's killer might be lurking nearby, but the only other visitor to the meadow was a skinny dog that raced around with the children, barking.

His name was Browncoat, Sova informed Nora; sometimes he belonged to her family, sometimes he belonged to the family in the next hut. “Right now he belongs to them,” she said, flopping down on the grass and hugging the dog, “because Ma says we can't feed him. Except sometimes. I miss Irseln,” she added suddenly.

“I thought you and Irseln didn't get along.”

“No, but she could run fast. She was good at this game.” Sova twisted a lock of hair. “I wish she could have run away from the killer. Then she would still be alive.”

“We don't know what happened yet,” Nora said carefully, but Sova shook her head.

“Gissy saw her ghost. Felt it.”

“Her ghost?” Nora said dubiously. Maybe Irseln
was
alive and Gissy had seen her.

“She pinched Gissy, like she always did. But there was no one there.”

The game was slackening. Gissy came trotting up slowly, tired, wisps of dry grass in her hair. “Tell Nora how Irseln pinched you last night,” Sova urged.

Gissy shook her head rebelliously. “Hungry,” she said. “I want stew.”

“Irseln pinched you, remember? Say yes, or I'll pinch you.”

“Hold on, Sova. No pinching,” Nora said hastily. “Why don't we go back to the house now?” Would there be anything to eat there? She hoisted the baby onto her hip and took Gissy by the hand. As she and the girls walked through the grass, Sova scolded her doll: “Did you pinch Gissy? Bad girl, do you want a whipping? There, how do you like that? Stop crying, you bad girl! I've never known a brat as bad as you.”

“She's crying because you're slapping her,” Nora said.

“If she won't stop crying, I will hit her with a stick. She has to mind her ma. She's a bad girl, as bad as Irseln.”

Horl ran over to them. “Are we going back?” he asked.

“Gissy's hungry, so we're going back to the house,” Nora said.

“There's nothing to eat there,” Horl said flatly.

“I want more stew,” said Gissy, her face crinkling. “The stew Ma made.”

“It's all gone now, Gissy,” Sova said.

“You be quiet, Sova,” said Horl. “You don't know what you're talking about.”

“I do, too!” Sova said with indignation. “My ma found a hurt goat, it was going to die,” she explained to Nora. “So we had stew.”

Horl sighed dramatically. “We weren't supposed to say anything about that, remember? The goat might belong to someone.”