The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic (27 page)

“It wasn't Nora's goat. Was it, Nora?”

“No, not mine,” Nora said lightly. “Was the stew good?”

“Yes. I wish we had more. Could the wizard turn a rock into stew?”

Nora had entertained similar questions. “I think so,” she hazarded. “But what if it turned back into a rock inside your stomach?”

They debated the potential side effects of transformed foodstuffs all the way back. Shadows were lengthening; the sun was low on the horizon. The dog accompanied them, running in and out of the woods with muddy paws. He carried a light-colored, knob-ended stick in his mouth; Nora found something about its shape disturbing.

When they came in sight of the house, Aruendiel and the headman were standing near the shed, talking. Horl broke into a run. “Where's my mother?” he demanded.

“She's inside,” Aruendiel said curtly, then watched as the boy ran into the house, slamming the back door behind him. Sova and Gissy followed more slowly, pulling the toddler between them.

Nora walked over to the magician. Aruendiel was having a discussion with the man in brown that was obviously growing heated, but had not quite risen to the level of argument. After a moment, Aruendiel broke off and looked down at her. She was struck by how somber he looked, the lines around his mouth as stark as cracks in ice.

“Aruendiel,” she said, “I have to talk to you. I think something absolutely terrible has happened.”

“Ah,” he said, seizing Nora's arm and leading her a few steps away, “what did the children say?” He spoke more warmly than she expected; it crossed her mind that he was pleased to have an ally.

“There's no proof,” she said, trying to marshal her thoughts and impressions, feeling dismayed because they made such a motley array. “But I have a bad, bad feeling. Irseln misbehaved, she wouldn't mind her mother—who's her stepmother, did you know that?” Aruendiel nodded, and Nora went on: “The little girl, Sova, she talked about hitting her doll with a stick because it was a bad girl, like Irseln. And they're all so thin—practically starving—but they had a big meal recently. Some kind of meat, a stew. The boy didn't want to talk about it. And then I saw the dog with a bone in its mouth, like a femur—oh, this sounds ridiculous.”

Aruendiel clenched his mouth. “No, this is an ugly business. Mistress Massy is lying about something, you don't need magic to see that—although that's what my magic says, too. But the headman doesn't want me to force the truth out of her. It's all right for that pathetic woodlicker, but not for the stepmother of the missing girl. His first cousin, too. We must find the girl's body. Where is the dog?”

“The dog?” Nora blinked. Aruendiel repeated his question with some impatience. She looked around but Browncoat had already wandered away. After some inquiry, and curious looks from those they asked, they tracked the dog to a neighboring hut. The dog lay outside the door, contentedly grinding a round stub of bone.

“That's not the same bone,” said Nora with disappointment.

“Where's the bone you had before?” Aruendiel demanded. He spoke with a rough familiarity, as though he and the dog were old acquaintances.

The dog raised its head and looked hard at Aruendiel, mildly surprised. It thumped its tail in the dust.

“Fetch it for us, please.”

The dog stood up slowly, stretching, and then trotted away toward Massy's hut. About halfway there, he left the path, scratched in the earth under a bush, and then emerged with a longer, more slender bone in his mouth.

“Good, very good, thank you.” Aruendiel bent down to rough the dog's fur behind the ears. He took the bone in his hand. “Yes, human. A child's thighbone. Where did you find this? Can you show me?”

The dog uttered a short whine.

“I don't have any here.”

Another whine, with an emphatic tilt of the muzzle.

“Very well. But first, you take me to the place where you got the bones. Mistress Nora,” he added abruptly, “there's some ham in my saddlebag. For our friend.”

“We're all mad here,” Nora said to herself, going in search of the ham. “I must be, too, or I wouldn't have come.”

When she came back, the hut's yard was empty, but she could follow the sound of voices through the deepening twilight. Off the path to the meadow, she found a sizable group gathered: the magician, the headman, and the men from the village. She could hear the scrape of spades against soil and pebbles. The villagers on the outskirts of the crowd were muttering to one another, something about how clever wizards thought they were.

After a few minutes, a spade hit something hard. Aruendiel said something to the diggers. They knelt and began using their hands to remove the dirt. There was a sudden pale wash of light; Nora recognized the illumination spell that Aruendiel had used in the library in Semr. Low murmurs traveled through the small crowd.

“Something's gnawed those bones. Curse these dogs.”

“Looky how that one's cut, straight as a rule. No dog did that.”

“Something funny about the color. Those bones, they aren't raw.”

“Horsecock, you're right, they're cooked. Somebody cooked her.”

The diggers piled the remains onto a piece of cloth, Aruendiel directing them not to miss anything. When he was finally satisfied, they wrapped up the bones and handed them to the magician. He and the headman turned back to the hut. The crowd, now curiously silent, trailed after them.

Nora was about to go, too, when she felt something brush against her knee. She looked down. Browncoat gazed back expectantly, his nose aimed at the greasy package she held.

•   •   •

Nora waited outside Massy's hut with most of the village. Aruendiel was inside, with Massy and the headman and a few others. The children had been extracted forcibly from the hut by a couple of men and taken to their aunt's on the other side of the village. Their wails dissolved slowly in the night air. In her mind, Nora ran over the clues that seemed to point to a horrific crime—the missing child, the hints of abuse, the bones that had been split and gnawed—and wondered how to make them add up to a different result.

At last the door of the hut opened again. The headman stepped out. He looked around at the villagers outside the hut, their faces tired and rapt, and said, “The girl's murderer has confessed. Time for you folk to go home.”

“Was it Massy?”

“Massy killed the girl?”

The headman said nothing; confirmation enough for the crowd.

“Did she cook the kid?”

“Did she eat her?”

“Go home,” said the headman again. Two more men came out of the hut, the same men who had been guarding Short Bernl in the afternoon, but now they were holding Massy, her arms bound behind her. The crowd began to shout at her. Massy looked away, head held proudly on her slender neck, as her captors pulled her toward the village, along the same path her children had taken.

A light still burned inside the hut. As the yard emptied, Nora went inside. Aruendiel stood alone in the center of the room, rubbing the back of his neck. There was a slow, mechanical quality to his movements. Turning, he saw Nora.

“What do you want?” he demanded. Then he seemed to recollect himself. “Well, you were right,” he said in a more civil tone. “It was much as you reckoned.”

“What did she say?”

“She killed the girl. Not deliberately. The child would not stop crying. After some chiding, she began to scream—and kick—and bite. The woman, Massy, had chores to do. She hit the child again. The girl fell and bruised her head. On that iron pot.” He nodded at a black shape near the fireplace. “Mistress Massy says Irseln sat up and seemed well enough. She put the child back to bed. But the girl did not answer her when she returned. A little later, she was dead.”

Aruendiel paused and seemed disinclined to continue.

“And then?” Nora asked.

“And then Mistress Massy had four hungry children to feed, and a drunken worthless lout of a husband who was drinking up whatever wages he'd managed to earn that day.”

“That's no excuse!”

“It was also a way to eliminate all traces of her crime. When the unfortunate Short Bernl came to the house that day, she even found a culprit for the child's disappearance.”

Nora reached for one of the stools, which lay overturned on the floor, and set it upright. “He said he thought that Massy would give him something to eat.”

“Don't sit there,” Aruendiel advised sharply. He went on: “Yes, he must have smelled cooking. But there's almost nothing in Mistress Massy's stores.”

“What do you mean, don't sit there?” Nora asked. “On this stool?”

As if to answer her, the stool reared onto two legs, then toppled over. “Some of your magic?” she asked.

“Not at all. It's the little girl. Irseln.”

“You're joking!” Nora said. But there was Sova's story. Nora looked at the stool dubiously. “Um, the little girl Gissy said Irseln pinched her, and there was no one there,” she added, in a more subdued voice.

“Irseln is still very angry about being killed and eaten by her family,” Aruendiel said drily. After a moment, he added: “Mistress Massy was resourceful enough to find her way around a truth-telling spell, which is to say nothing at all. But she found the stool's continuing movement unsettling. That is what finally drove her to confess.”

“Oh, so you didn't have to torture her?” Nora said, with an edge in her voice.

“Torture? Oh, you are thinking of Short Bernl. I only subjected him to some additional unpleasantness because no one in the village would have believed him otherwise.”

Nora frowned. “You didn't have to do that.”

“They accepted his first confession, even though it was obviously false, simply because they had tortured him. That's the problem with torture,” he added irritably. “It is practically useless unless it's combined with a truth spell. Most people will say anything under torture, even before the irons are fully hot.”

“There are other reasons why torture is bad, but at least we can agree on that one,” Nora said. She was silent for a moment. “Did the other children know what Massy did? They told me their mother found an injured goat and made it into stew.”

Aruendiel shrugged. “The taste of goat and the taste of human flesh are quite different.”

“How would you know that?”

He gave her a sideways look. “There are some old spells that call for the magic-worker to consume the recently dead. A small portion.”

“That's such a foul idea I don't even want to know where the dead bodies come from,” Nora said. Her idea of practicing magic someday suddenly seemed slightly less attractive.

“It's a very obsolete branch of magic,” Aruendiel said. “Well, the children might not have known the taste of goat, either. The only time peasants like these eat meat is the Black Offering at New Year's.” He added: “The father might have noticed something amiss—if he hadn't been in his cups. Massy told how much he had enjoyed the stew.”

“Horrible. Poor Irseln! I don't blame her for being angry.”

Aruendiel made a vague noise of assent and passed a hand over his face. “I will judge Mistress Massy's case tomorrow, before we leave.” His gaze was locked on the bones, still wrapped in cloth and lying on the hearth. Suddenly the story that Hirizjahkinis had told came back to Nora, and a mad, shimmering, impossible notion took shape in her mind.

“Can you bring her back?” she asked.

The stool lying on its side righted itself suddenly, then fell over with a thud.

Aruendiel rubbed the back of his neck again. He spoke as though he were talking to himself: “Can I? The child's spirit is here and willing; there is no need to summon it.”

“Oh, if you can, of course you must!” Nora said passionately. “Yes, bring her back! You can do it?”

“It is perilous to wake the dead,” he said, much as he had told the queen in Semr.

“But she's already awake.” The stool rocked and shuddered as though to underscore her words. “And Irseln was only a little girl,” Nora added. “All those years ahead, stolen from her. She deserves to come back, to live her life.”

Aruendiel met her eyes with a long, pensive look. He spoke more kindly than before: “Many, many children die. They cannot all be returned to the living world.”

“I don't know, maybe they should be,” Nora said. She dropped her gaze, annoyed at the quaver in her own voice. “But here we're talking about just one child. Irseln.”

Aruendiel looked away, as if in search of another thought, and his crooked shoulders seemed to tighten under an invisible load. “Very well,” he said. “Fetch some wood for the fire, Mistress Nora.”

•   •   •

Aruendiel laid the fragile bones out carefully on a quilt taken from the bed, reassembling Irseln's skeleton as best he could. With the kindling that Nora had brought, he filled in the missing parts of the skeleton, then scooped up the bones and twigs and dropped them into the iron pot. He emptied one of Massy's pitchers into the vessel. Then, with a heave, he hoisted it to hang on a hook above the fire. Using his pocketknife, he scraped up some dirt from the packed earth floor and threw it into the pot.

Without a word, he went out of the hut. Nora waited, listening to the restless movements of the fire and the faint hooting of owls outside. Irseln's stool creaked from time to time.

Aruendiel returned half an hour later, carrying a saddlebag over his shoulder and a small, stunned-looking brown rabbit pressed against his chest. The animal roused itself to a last spasm of hopeless kicking before Aruendiel killed it with a casual wrench of the neck. Like unscrewing a jar of pickles. Nora hoped he had not seen her wince.

Aruendiel put the rabbit into the pot and poked the fire. Obediently, the flames surged around the base of the pot. He watched for several minutes with an appraising eye, and then turned away. “You gave all of the ham to the dog?” he asked.