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.”

Startled, Nora gave a small snort of laughter. “Well, I’m almost thirty! I probably am thirty by now. Why are you surprised?”

“You said that, in your own world, you were still a student. How long does your course of study last?”

The duration of graduate school, always a sore subject. “Oh, two or three more years, at least.” Or four or five. Nora sighed. “How old are you, Aruendiel?”

He seemed entertained rather than offended at the bluntness of her question. “Old enough so that thirty seems—well, I can barely recognize the arrogant fool I was at thirty.”

“Some forty-year-olds would say the same thing.”

“Old enough that even I have trouble figuring my age.”

“Hmm,” Nora said, unimpressed. She did not have high confidence in Aruendiel’s mathematical skills. “That’s an obvious evasion.”

“Old enough,” he said finally, “that the granddaughter of my granddaughter is an old woman.”

“Really!” Nora sat up straight. “Who is she? I didn’t know that you had children or grandchildren—or great- great-grandchildren. I never heard Mrs. Toristel mention any.”

“Mrs. Toristel does not know every branch of my family tree,” Aruendiel said sharply.

“That must be at least—” She began to calculate. Say twenty-five or thirty years for a generation. “One hundred fifty years? One sixty?” She watched Aruendiel’s face closely, but he gave nothing away. “Two hundred!”

“I am not that old,” he corrected her. “The last time I bothered to count, some birthdays ago, it was close to one hundred and eighty.”

“Goodness.” After a moment, she added: “That’s not as old as I thought you might be.”

“Oh?” He arched his black brows.

“You made it a bit of a mystery—I thought you might be five hundred, or a thousand.”

“Gods forbid!” he said, an unexpected raw edge in his voice.

“As long as you don’t actually look or feel that old—” Aruendiel’s chilly look interrupted her thought. “Hirizjahkinis said that working magic keeps you young,” she added, a little lamely.

“To most appearances.” His tone did not encourage a response. They sat in silence for a few minutes, and then he stood up, grimacing as he straightened his back. “My spine feels even older than the rest of me,” he said, with a shade of bitterness. “It is turning to iron as I sit here by the fire like an old woman. Come, it is still light enough for a walk to the forest.”

“It’s snowing,” Nora said, twisting to look at the hall’s windows.

“Are you so frail, a sprig of thirty?”

The air outside, alive with lightly falling snow, was bright enough for them to see all the way to the river, although it was almost nightfall. They walked a little way into the woods, past the frozen river.

The elusive background murmur of the forest was not so elusive today. It washed into her ears and then out again, but not before she could sense a shape to it, a current of meaning, even if she could not understand what it meant. She could tell that Aruendiel had joined in the long, meandering song, a small, distinctly human voice among the wild, slow voices of the trees. Wood was his favorite among the elements that he commonly used in working magic. He lost patience with stone; air and fire were fast and showy but lacked staying power—

Добавить отзыв
ВСЕ ОТЗЫВЫ О КНИГЕ В ИЗБРАННОЕ

0

Вы можете отметить интересные вам фрагменты текста, которые будут доступны по уникальной ссылке в адресной строке браузера.

Отметить Добавить цитату