The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic (46 page)

He must have tried to do something to the ring. Still gripping Nora's neck, Aruendiel held out his free hand, calling Dorneng a fool, demanding the ring. Running feet, fear in Mrs. Toristel's voice: “What in the name of all the gods, your lordship?”

They can't destroy it, Nora thought. Maybe the ring can never be destroyed. Inside its marble sleeve, her left arm was being ground to powder. The stone methodically crushed her elbow, then the shoulder joint. The nerves shrieked as they died.

“Aruendiel,” she said, her voice less than a whisper. Her panicked lungs were locked inside a shrinking box. “Aruendiel.” Finally he heard, and turned back toward her, stooping slightly to put his ear next to her mouth, so close her lips almost brushed his hair.

“Put it back,” she breathed. “The ring. Put it back.”

He jerked his head around to glare at her, black eyebrows diving with rage and astonishment.

“Now. Please,” she managed just before her lips grew hard and her tongue froze. Light turned to darkness as stone filled her eyes.

It's over, Nora thought with disbelief. All of it. I'll be a statue, forever, unless Aruendiel finds a way to change me back. Or, if he does, wouldn't I just be a messy little puddle of crushed bone and blood? Her lungs struggled hopelessly for one more thin breath. Her head was heavier than before; she could not hold it upright if her neck were not already turning to stone. It was not death, for I stood up, and all the dead lie down, she thought, but there was no comfort there.

Her knees gave way. She collapsed.

Someone grabbed at her, but she landed on the side of her hip, hard, the same spot she'd barked on the table before. Her hands smacked the chilly stone floor, too late to break her fall.

In a rush she understood that the flagstones under her stinging palms were cold because her hands were warm and alive. Her lungs gulped air gratefully. She raised her left hand for inspection: healthy skin over living muscles, nerves, blood, and bone. And Raclin's ring encircling the third finger.

It was what she had wanted, sort of, but Nora began to cry anyway. Her sight blurred, the ring mockingly brilliant as it dissolved into golden light. She covered her face and curled into a ball and sobbed passionately with all the grief and fear and heartbreak that marble statues can never feel. Someone took hold of her shoulders with kind, strong hands. She turned to Aruendiel gratefully.

But it was Mrs. Toristel pulling her close, patting her gently on the back, calling her a poor little mouse. Nora leaned her head against Mrs. Toristel's thin shoulder and cried harder than ever.

After a while Mrs. Toristel helped her to her feet. Nora stood up shakily. On the other side of the great hall, near the outside door, Aruendiel was talking to Dorneng, evidently showing him out. Dorneng, she thought, looked wilted. As he went out the door, he sneaked a glance back at Nora, but he looked away quickly when he saw her looking at him.

Aruendiel followed Dorneng's glance. As soon as the door was shut, he came over with long, limping strides. Mrs. Toristel was steering Nora upstairs, to be dosed with hot applejack and honey and then to spend the rest of the day in bed; Nora could not think of a reason to oppose the plan. The housekeeper gave the magician a reproachful look—daring for her, Nora thought—and asked him if it was really necessary to scare the poor child so. She seemed to be under the impression that all the mischief stemmed from the explosion that Dorneng had used to destroy the ring.

Aruendiel hesitated for a moment, then said: “I regret any anxiety I may have caused you, Mistress Nora. How are you feeling now?”

Nora was about to say that it wasn't his fault. But then it came to her that
he
was the famous magician, after all—perhaps he should have known that removing the ring would make something terrible happen. “I'm all right.” She lifted her hand with a rueful smile, showing him the ring. “At least this worked.”

His pale eyes flicked over the ring. “It is not much of a cure,” he said venomously.

“You could try cutting off my finger.” She wasn't sure whether she was joking or not. Maybe, she thought angrily, that was the only way to get rid of the ring. It might be worth trading a finger to avoid the risk of ever becoming a marble statue again.

Aruendiel's face contorted. For a moment he looked stricken, then wrathful. Mrs. Toristel uttered a cry.

“What a terrible idea, Nora,” she said, pursing her lips. “There's no reason to do that, even if you can't get it off. If you must have it gone, I'm sure his lordship will find a way eventually, but
I
think it's a handsome ring, after all, nothing to be ashamed of, and it never caused any trouble before.”

Not exactly, Nora thought, but she let herself be led off to bed. The applejack took away some of the lurking dread that still oppressed her spirits, but she found she did not want to drink the entire enormous draft that Mrs. Toristel had pressed on her. Anything that threatened her control of her own body seemed anathema. What she did drink sent her to sleep for a few hours. Nora dreamed not of marble statues, thankfully, but of a disjointed conversation with EJ—something about not forgetting their mother's birthday—that ended when she remembered that he was dead.

She awoke in a contemplative mood and spent some time regarding the ring on her finger, wiggling her toes at intervals just because she could. There was some solace in Mrs. Toristel's observation, Nora thought wryly: At least she wasn't stuck with something ugly on her finger. How fortunate that Raclin had decent taste in jewelry. After screwing up her courage, she gave the ring a tentative tug to see if it would come off. To her secret relief, it did not.

At last she arose and went in search of Aruendiel. She found him, as she expected, in the library, where he was bent over a large volume whose pages were completely black, except for a painted border of twining vines bearing fat bunches of skulls.

“What is that?” she asked, pointing at the book.

“
Recipes for Silence.
” Raising his head, Aruendiel closed the book. “Come here.” He took hold of Nora's chin and did a rapid check for enchantment in her ears and nostrils.

“I'm fine,” Nora said. “Except that my neck's still a little sore where you grabbed me. I suppose you're trying to decide on the best way to kill Raclin?”

“Yes,” Aruendiel said without visible emotion. “It is time to finish this matter. I have let it fester far too long.”

“I don't want you to,” Nora said.

“I beg your pardon?”

She took a deep breath. “That turning-to-stone spell—I don't ever want to go through it again. And we”—she meant
you
—“don't know what might set it off. If you attacked Raclin, who knows how he might retaliate. Or, killing him could trigger the spell again—or something worse.” Seeing the expression on Aruendiel's face, Nora raised her hands as though to protect herself or placate him. “I know this is not the honorable thing to do—maybe I'm a coward—but I almost died today, and you couldn't help me.”

“If I had destroyed the ring, the enchantment would likely have been broken entirely.”

“Maybe. Or maybe I'd be solid marble now. You don't know. And Hirizjahkinis is right. You shouldn't take on the Faitoren all by yourself. Just leave them alone.”

The rough white scars stood out on Aruendiel's flushed cheeks. “Do you retain some tender feelings for your estranged husband, that you argue for his life?”

“That's not fair. You know that's wrong. Whatever feelings I ever had for Raclin, they were fake to begin with. But if you kill him—who knows what the ring will do to me?”

“I will force him to break the enchantment. He does not have to die quickly.”

“But it's still risky.” Nora clenched her fists. “I don't want any more bad things to happen. Not right now. Not—for a while.”

Aruendiel looked as though he wanted to take her by the throat again. “Do you know how much danger you're in, as long as that Faitoren viper lives?”

“Yes,” she said evenly. Silence, during which they both heard her unspoken words: Because you can't protect me. Nora cleared her throat. “I mean, what sort of spell was that, this morning? Do you even know how to reverse it?”

“Any spell can be reversed,” he snapped, “given study. That petrifaction spell was Faitoren magic of unusual power and intensity.”

“Well, exactly,” Nora said. She looked at the floor and sighed. “How long would I have been a statue before you reversed the spell?”

“Too long,” Aruendiel said, his voice thick with fury. He rose with a jerk from his chair and carried
Recipes for Silence
across the room, then fitted it into an empty space in the bookshelves. An instant later, it vanished. “As you wish,” he said, turning to glower again at Nora. “I will not seek vengeance, not yet.”

“All right, thank you,” Nora said awkwardly.

He returned his attention to the bookshelves. There seemed to be nothing more to say.

T
he Null Days began. At first Nora was in no mood at all for the holiday. Her nerves were still frayed, the castle seemed less secure than before, Aruendiel had not had a cordial word for her ever since she had asked him not to kill Raclin, and unsettlingly, Nora found herself being equally brusque with him. There was no logic to it, she knew. She should be angry at Raclin, but it was Aruendiel who had taken the ring off her finger—to show that he could do what Dorneng couldn't, really—and then failed to save her from the consequences. What if he had refused, at the last minute, to put the ring back on her finger? He had certainly hesitated.

She had more time to brood about this because her lessons were suspended, and suddenly there was nothing in particular to do, after the rush of last-minute cooking: smoked fish dumplings, pickled eggs and vegetables, meat cakes, lard buns, beet pudding, barley soup to stay warm on the back of the stove. Far too much food for the castle household to finish in five days, but much of it, Nora quickly saw, was intended for the visitors who arrived in a small but steady trickle. It was evidently the custom during the Null Days to present one's host with branches cut from fir trees.

The sight of the evergreens displayed in the great hall like trophies, the hum of mingled voices, the platters of food—they were familiar cues; it was more like Christmas at home than she would have imagined. Despite herself, her spirits began to rise.

Oen Lun, one of Aruendiel's vassals, rode over from Broken Keep, wearing a rusty breastplate. He looked very much the way Nora had always imagined Don Quixote. Some of the farmers who worked Aruendiel's more distant holdings came, including Peusienith, the young widower whom Aruendiel had once suggested that she marry. He was pleasant-mannered, with a solid, successful air, but Nora could not bring herself to be very friendly. She made a point of introducing him to Morinen, who came calling with her mother and her brothers, and they discovered that they were third cousins twice removed.

Nora was more interested to meet another of Morinen's cousins: Ferret, the boy who had gone up before Aruendiel for assault and horse theft at the last assizes. Contrary to expectations, Ferret had not been hanged. He seemed to regard his near execution as a good joke. “His lordship said I'd lied about some things, and the other bastards, he said they lied about everything,” Ferret recounted. “He wasn't going to hang me on their say-so. He gave me the lash instead. Said it was because I'd been fool enough to steal horses with worthless scum who sold me out the first chance they got.”

“He also said this was your first offense,” Morinen added warningly. “And that next time it'll be your hand.”

“There won't be a next time,” Ferret said confidently. “Either I won't steal horses again, or I won't get caught, because I'll steal them with boys that I can trust, you see?”

“His lordship is right, Ferret, you're an idiot,” Morinen said.

The Toristels' daughter and one of her teenage sons were staying in the Toristels' quarters. It was cramped over there; Aruendiel had said that the guests could stay in the manor house, but Mrs. Toristel thought that it wouldn't be fitting and said that she didn't want to impose on the master. Which was ridiculous, Nora thought, because Aruendiel was clearly pleased to see Lolona and her son. A plumper version of her mother, Lolona had spent her childhood in the castle, and she was one of the few people—Hirizjahkinis being another—who seemed to have absolutely no fear of either the magician or Mrs. Toristel. Aruendiel listened to news of her children and her brewery with courteous attention, and promised a charm to rid one of her vats of a rope infestation.

Nora liked Lolona's cheerful, no-nonsense air, although she was slightly alarmed by the way Lolona kept remarking that her mother's housekeeping had declined with age and that, if not for the Null Days, she and Nora would have a grand old time cleaning the castle from top to bottom. There, Nora found it hard to respond. She thought she and Mrs. Toristel had done exactly that.

But by the afternoon of the third day, the Null Days were living up to their name. A new snowstorm had discouraged visitors. The woolly gray light outside hardly penetrated the windows; inside, the big Null Days candles, made for endurance, not luminosity, barely interrupted the gloom. Nora took a seat by the fire in the great hall and wondered morbidly where Aruendiel would have put her statue if he had not been able to remove the Faitoren spell. When he came in, she said peevishly: “You know, I don't worship the sun. I don't see how he could be offended if I did some magic or some reading—or
something
—during the Null Days.”

Aruendiel, warming his hands in front of the fire, looked at her thoughtfully, as though measuring the bile in her tone. “You have been talking to Mrs. Toristel,” he said. “She is very much attached to her sun god. In this part of the world, it is the Lady Ewe whom we honor during the Null Days. And in Stone Top, they will tell you that the holiday is for Erkin Sheafbearer.”

“Right, the god of beer.” Nora had learned this fact only yesterday. Lolona had a shrine to him next to her vats. “Do you believe in this religious—stuff?”

“Me? I prefer to have as little truck with gods as possible. I have never found them to be very reliable allies.”

She snickered, but he seemed to be quite serious. “You're talking about actual gods,” she said. “You believe in them?”

He shrugged. “They exist, whether I believe in them or not.”

Nora pondered this for a moment. In a different tone, she asked: “Is that where your magic comes from? Some kind of gift from the gods?”

Aruendiel rounded on her. “Have you learned nothing at all, that you could ask such a ridiculous question? Do you have no understanding of the nature of magic at all?”

“Well, I'm still learning,” she said defensively.

“Painfully slowly, I see,” he said. “You should know from your own experience that real magic comes out of what is around you, it is born from the long conversation, negotiation, fellowship that human beings have with the things of the world. A god would never give us such a valuable gift. Humans had to learn it for themselves.” He flung himself into the chair opposite Nora and frowned at her again, but there was an expectancy in the cool gray eyes that she had not seen for some days.

“Well, then, how did
you
learn magic?” Nora's question hung in the air for a moment. “I'd like to hear that story.”

“Hmm.” Aruendiel looked away, into the fire. “Your time would be better spent learning actual magic than in listening to that tale.”

“I can't do magic now, because of the holiday,” she said. “And I'd like to know, because it might help me understand some things better. Why
I
can do magic, for instance.”

“I don't know the answer to that question,” he said, twisting his mouth dismissively. “But it is less important than the fact that you
do
work magic.”

“You mentioned a couple of possible reasons once. I thought of another one. This,” she said, holding up her finger with the gold ring.

“Absurd.”

“It might somehow have influenced me—or
tainted
me—I don't know.” She could not put her inchoate anxieties into words.

Aruendiel was shaking his head. “No, that cursed ring, no matter what evil it contains, has nothing to do with your ability to practice magic.”

“But how can you—?”

“Nora, I am sure of it,” he said with some intensity. “If I thought there was any chance at all, I would not have taught you a single spell, nothing.” She knew that was so. Of course, he still might be mistaken about the ring's influence, but she felt a little better.

“It's far more likely,” Aruendiel went on, “that your capability for magic comes about because you are an observant, intelligent woman, a scholar—”

Nora was strangely moved by the compliment, but she could not quite bring herself to show it. “Hirgus Ext is a scholar,” she observed.

“Hirgus!” Aruendiel snorted and sank back in his chair, a little stiffly. His back appeared to be more painful than usual, Nora thought. Had he not even worked the owl transformation since the Null Days began? When she asked him, he admitted snappishly that it was true.

“Are you worried about offending Lady Ewe?”

He snorted again. “No! I mind my own business, and I expect the gods to mind theirs in return. The Null Days, though, can be an unlucky time of year,” he added in a more thoughtful tone. “Magic is more likely to go awry at this season than any other. I used to pay no mind to the Null Days, and sometimes that led me into difficulties.”

He had even abandoned his usual careful shaving, Nora thought. There was a silver stripe in the stubble in his chin. “What kind of difficulties?” she asked, although she had a feeling he would not tell her. She was right.

“What of your own gods?” he asked her, flicking aside her question with an impatient gesture. “What about your own Null Days?”

“Christmas?” She had mentioned it to him the day before.

“Yes, your Gresmus. How do you celebrate it, at home in your own world?”

Nora felt a sudden tug of longing. “Well, we put up a fir tree in the living room and cover it with decorations, lights—” She did her best to explain what the holiday was supposed to be about and how it was actually celebrated. It was difficult. She found herself digressing to describe shopping malls and credit cards. She was not sure that Aruendiel would understand what the frenetic exchange of expensive gifts had to do with the birth of a divinity in Bethlehem two thousand years ago, but then a lot of people wondered about that.

“My mother and stepfather live out in the country, and they go out and chop down a tree on their land. They always have white lights on their tree—my mother thinks colored lights are a little tawdry,” she said. “And they
always
go to church—they're very religious. My father and Kathy, his wife—they might go on Christmas Eve, if things aren't too crazy. My sisters go nuts at Christmas. Well, Leigh's getting past that—she's thirteen now—but Ramona's only ten.” Nora became aware, as she went on, that she was talking more for her own benefit than for Aruendiel's. She was also aware of how much she missed them all.

After she had finished, Aruendiel stirred and took his gaze away from the fire. “Your parents, they are not married to each other?”

“Well, they were, once!” Nora said quickly. Her status in this world was complicated enough without the suspicion of bastardy. “They were divorced, oh, fifteen years ago. They're friendly enough now,” she added, anticipating the next question. “Not friends, but friendly.”

“You have no brothers?” Aruendiel inquired. When she shook her head, he said: “Your father, I suppose, married again to try to beget a male heir.”

“Oh, no,” Nora said, shaking her head. But she could not say that he was completely wrong. “Well, yes and no,” she amended. “In fact, I did have a brother. He died. And my parents got divorced, and they each remarried, and then my sisters came along. But my father was happy enough with daughters.” She added: “It's not as though he has any ancestral estates to pass down.”

“How did your brother die?”

“He was killed in a car accident.”

Aruendiel's pale gaze was steady. She took that as an indication to continue. It still pained her that someone as smart as EJ had died in such a stupid, trite, unnecessary way. Kevin, who was driving, had had six beers. Blood alcohol, 0.14. EJ had only two beers, and he was a big guy, so if
he'd
been driving, they probably would have been okay. But it was Kevin's car, and EJ was too nice to take the keys away from him. If only—once in his life—EJ had been a jerk.

Nora paused to collect her breath, aware that she had been speaking a mixture of Ors and English, and that Aruendiel could not know what blood alcohol meant, among other things, but he was nodding slowly.

She talked about EJ for some time. It was always that way. She almost never mentioned him anymore, but once she started, she couldn't stop. Nora had a vague but powerful sense that it was unfair to her brother to sum him up only by the circumstances of his death. Yet even when she tried to talk about his life, she always returned to that unchangeable fact. “He was kind of a nerd, you know. Very smart, but a little overweight, and shy around girls. A girl from his class came up to me at the funeral. She'd had a crush on EJ, but she never told him. It broke my heart, that he could have had a girlfriend, he could have been out with her that night instead of Kevin and Nick. She was a nice person—Valerie Chin. I kept up with her for a while. She went to medical school. Maybe that was a little weird, keeping in touch. I don't know.”

Sometimes people remarked that it must be a comfort to have her two little sisters in EJ's place—a remark that left Nora slightly stunned every time, because as much as she loved Leigh and Ramona, it was not because they could ever replace EJ. If you faced facts, after all, if EJ were still alive, her parents might not have divorced, her sisters would never have been born.

Aruendiel did not strain to find the silver lining. Instead, he said: “It is hard to lose a brother or sister. I had several siblings, and while I was not equally fond of all of them, I was surprised to find how much I missed them—even my brother Aruendic—when they were dead.”

“I'm sorry,” Nora said, wondering how to express condolences in Ors. “Losing one brother was bad enough.”

“It was a long time ago,” he said. “When did your brother die?”

“I was thirteen—so sixteen years ago at least, depending on how much time has passed back home.”

Aruendiel pondered this for a moment. “You are older than I thought.”