The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

about. He registered them automatically as he went about his business, the way a driver might note potential parking spots on a crowded city street.

“You must be more alert, you must be able to sense the presence of useful elements,” he said. “You do not want to be the sort of magician who must build a fire every time he wants to work a spell.”

“Or she wants to work a spell.” Campaigning for nonsexist phrasing was a losing battle in Ors, where gender governed even the choice of preposition, but sometimes Nora could not resist. Usually Aruendiel tolerated these corrections with a minimum of sarcasm.

“I speak of mediocre practitioners only,” he pointed out now. “I have encountered few female magicians, but they have all been good ones. I hope that you will not prove an exception.”

“Really?” Nora asked with interest. “What other female magicians have you known, besides Hirizjahkinis? Do you mean Ilissa?”

His expression shifted, like a door yanked shut. “Ilissa is hardly what I would term a magician. I was thinking primarily of Hirizjahkinis.”

Interesting, though. He had certainly used the plural. Aruendiel’s past life was much on Nora’s mind these days, in part because of the new project with which she was assisting him. Hirgus’s visit had apparently inspired Aruendiel to free the ghosts that he himself had bound into spells at the beginning of his career, when he still called himself a wizard. So far the process had been quieter than she had feared: no more nocturnal explosions or unexplained bruises. Instead he had asked her to search through some of his old books and papers for a few specific spells.

Here Nora found lists of demons and their attributes, recipes for potions, incantations—the sort of magic that she had never seen him practice. His handwriting was rounder and looser than the spiky hand he wrote now. In his younger days, Aruendiel also seemed to have been considerably less organized. Some spells were scribbled on the back of bills (twenty-two gold beetles for an inlaid dagger sheath, eight beetles six beads for scented gloves); others filled the margins of a manual on cavalry tactics, The Cunning Horseman in Battle.

She read with curiosity, looking for hints of the life that Aruendiel had led as a young man. Much of the magic had some military function, direct or indirect. There were spells to keep sword blades sharp; to embolden cowards; to redraw an opponent’s maps; or to revive a man who has been cut in half. She lost count of the number of spells for panicking an enemy’s horses. He had scrawled notes alongside many of the spells. Best under a quarter moon. More sulfur. A thicket of calculations, not always accurate. Whoever said this would cure the clap should be fucked backward. There were several such spells for curing venereal diseases—always useful in an army camp, no doubt. She found no love spells, although she noted a disturbing spell for making a woman as drunk on one glass of wine as if she had drunk three.

“Did you compose all of these spells yourself?” she asked Aruendiel one day, as he came into the library.

“Some of them,” he said indifferently. “Most I swapped with other wizards, or found in books. How are you progressing? Have you found the spells I asked for?”

“Two of them so far,” she said, consulting the list on her wax tablet. “The spell for making men grunt like pigs, and the one for making it rain poisonous toads. There are half a dozen spells for wrapping an army in fog— which one did you want?”

“The one I require starts with roasting the heart and feathers of a black rooster over a fire of dung—gods, the smell!” Aruendiel grimaced. “Is there a black rooster in the flock now?”

“No, he’s speckled. Glory be to God for dappled things—all things original, counter, spare, strange,” she added in English. Aruendiel fixed her with a questioning eye. “Sorry,” she said, switching back to Ors, “something that just came to mind.”

“Was that a spell in your language?” he asked with a trace of suspicion.

“Poetry. There’s a black rooster in the village, in Porlus’s flock.”

“It’ll be expensive, three weeks before the Null Days,” Aruendiel said, clicking his tongue with annoyance. He went back to his workroom upstairs, hunching slightly as he climbed the spiral staircase.

Three weeks, two days, Nora thought as she went back to her scroll. The Null Days were looming large in her life. Currently, she and Mrs. Toristel were engaged in a general housecleaning for the holidays, to be followed by a kitchen round of roasting and baking. Mrs. Toristel worked with an unusual air of animation; her daughter and a grandson were coming to visit from Barsy.

The Null Days, Nora had learned from Mrs. Toristel and an old almanac in Aruendiel’s study, were the five, sometimes six days that were not counted in the official calendar of 360 days. They fell when the nights were at their longest, after the old year had ended, before the new year began. No legal business could be transacted then, no new enterprises undertaken. It was considered unlucky even to light a fire during the Null Days, so the same fire was kept burning continuously throughout the holiday—not that anyone let their fire go out at this time of year anyway—along with special, fat candles designed to burn for days. While the Null Days lasted, Nora gathered, one did as little as possible. No cooking, no cleaning, and only the most necessary chores involving the livestock— all fine with her—but also no reading, writing, or practicing magic. Then came New Year’s Day, when a new fire was kindled and a yearling animal, all black, was killed with a stone blade. Mr. Toristel had set aside a young black ram some months ago for this purpose.

In other words, the Null Days were a solstice holiday, a lighted pause in midwinter darkness, celebrated with food, fire, conviviality, idleness, this world’s equivalent of Christmas without the religious backstory. Nora was looking forward to it with cautious interest. “So what do people do to pass the time?” Nora asked Mrs. Toristel one morning as they rubbed beeswax into the railing of the gallery in the great hall.

“Well.” Mrs. Toristel sighed. “Back home in Pelagnia, we always took care to observe the Null Days properly. None of this feasting or merrymaking. We fasted every day, all of us, and some folks would flog themselves at nightfall.”

“That doesn’t sound like much fun.”

“We know what’s owed to the sun lord. You have to show him proper respect. Here, they don’t take it as seriously. All this eating and visiting they do. And the drinking! My father never took a drop during the Null Days until the New Year. Toristel’s gotten as bad as the rest of them. He has his ale the same as ever and a little extra. He says winter’s worse up here, and a man has to do something to keep the chill off.

“Oh, heavens,” she added, with another sigh. “So much left to do. Nora, can you sweep the hall, or are you going up to see him now?”

With some reluctance, Nora thrust the broom under the long table and began fishing out a quantity of grit, wood ash, and dog hair. A small object among the sweepings caught her eye. She noticed it only because she had seen something like it in the courtyard recently. A small, whitish object, roughly oval. It had a smooth, organic look, like the chrysalis of a large insect. Experimentally, she stamped on it with her boot. Inside, a bundle of bones, delicate as needles. The remains of a mouse, perhaps.

Nora looked around thoughtfully, up toward the crossing beams that supported the roof of the hall, then back at the litter of bones on the floor.

“I’d like to know more about transformations,” she announced to Aruendiel when she arrived in his library that afternoon.

Craning his neck, Aruendiel stood studying the books lined up across the ceiling, searching for a title. With his head thrown back, his long, dark hair falling away from his face, his lanky form looked more skewed and off- kilter than ever, like a marionette hanging from twisted strings. “Transformations?” he said after a minute. “That’s far too advanced for you. You cannot even work a levitation spell reliably yet.”

“I’ll have to practice some more today, with that nice light gray feather that you gave me,” Nora said cheerfully. “I wonder where it came from, by the way. We don’t have any chickens that color. But going back to transformations, I’m just interested in the general theory. Why a magician might want to turn himself into—oh—an owl, for instance.

“Would it be because of a curse, or because for some reason he enjoyed being an owl? Could he turn himself into other things, too? What is it like to be an owl? Would he know how to fly? Would he be friendly with real owls? Would he remember being a man? Would he mind eating small animals raw and then throwing up their bones later on? I’m just curious as to how all this might work.”