whereas, he said lovingly, you could do almost anything with wood.
And all these trees, with their fat trunks and interlocking branches, were younger than he was. Sheep had grazed here, he’d said, within his lifetime. One hundred eighty years, when some people lived only sixteen.
“Have you any more passages of your book to be corrected?” Aruendiel asked, coming into the great hall toward the end of the fourth day. He must be very bored, she thought. Reading her last translation, before the holidays, Aruendiel had complained sharply about Mr. Collins. He was not a reader who suspended judgment easily, or who took pleasure in meeting characters in the pages of a book whom he would not want to meet in real life.
“As a matter of fact, yes,” Nora said, after a moment’s consideration. She had done some surreptitious translation that morning while keeping an eye on the fires.
“Bring it out,” he directed. “I might as well correct it now as later.”
“It’s not unlucky to go over homework during the Null Days?” she asked slyly.
“Let us consider it more in the nature of storytelling. That is something that people always do at this season, when there is nothing else to pass the time.”
“The Toristels were telling stories last night,” she remarked, rising to fetch her book and wax tablets.
“Mrs. Toristel talked about the black elves, I suppose?”
“Yes, she did.” The black elves, Nora had learned, sometimes lured their victims with haunting music played on flutes made from human bones. Or they called out in the voices of the recently dead. Even when they knew better, many people couldn’t help calling back when they heard those lost, familiar tones—only to be chased down by the black elves with their small, powerful hands and their needle teeth. “Do black elves really exist?” Nora asked Aruendiel.
“I have never seen one,” he said with a snort, reaching for the wax tablets.
As usual, it took him some time to read through her translation, as he kept stopping to point out the deficiencies in her handwriting, spelling, and grammar. She was curious what he would make of the ball at Netherfield, but his only response was some skepticism that polite society would allow men and women to dance together in public. “I myself would not care one way or the other, who dances with whom,” he said, “but it does not seem very realistic.”
Something about Lydia had caught his fancy—he seemed to enjoy her brash waywardness—and Mr. Bennet had appealed to him from the beginning. But Aruendiel seemed to dislike Mr. Darcy as much as Elizabeth Bennet did at first. Mr. Darcy’s famous pride, Aruendiel noted once, was excessive for a man who seemed to have little to occupy his time and was not even a real peer. Nora was taken aback by his reaction until remembering something Freud had said about how the people who annoy us most are those who remind us of ourselves.
“Even if you prefer not to use the feminine verb forms yourself, you should make sure that Mistress Bennet uses them correctly,” Aruendiel said as he put down the tablets.
“Must I?” Nora frowned. “It takes something away, to have those little ladylike hems and haws when she’s sparring with Darcy. She’s supposed to be impertinent, not demure. That’s the problem with translations,” she added sadly. “You can never quite reproduce the flavor of the original.”
“Then let Mistress Bennet speak as you think she should,” Aruendiel said unexpectedly. “No one would take her for a well-bred Semran young lady, anyway.”
He seemed lost in thought for some moments, tapping his fingers slowly on the arm of his chair. Nora had the strong sense that he had been talking about her as much as Elizabeth Bennet. Was it a veiled criticism? His tone had been mild enough.
“How are you recovering?” he asked suddenly. He gestured toward her hand.
It was the first time Aruendiel had alluded to the ring episode since before the Null Days began. “Very well, thank you,” Nora said.
But he seemed disinclined to let the matter drop. “An unwilling transformation is difficult. Galling for the spirit. And what you endured was particularly vicious.”
“So, transformations aren’t always that painful?” When Aruendiel shook his head, Nora asked: “What about Massy, the woman you turned into an apple tree?” She had been thinking about Massy lately, trying to remember the exact expression on her face as flesh became wood.
“No, she felt nothing except surprise. And as I recall,” he added with a lift of his eyebrows, “you said that I had been too gentle with her.”
“I’ve since changed my mind,” Nora said. She grinned at Aruendiel, and fleetingly he smiled back. She seized the moment. “Aruendiel, will you tell me how you learned magic? It
“Ah, and you think there are some lessons in my biography about the misuse of magic?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Nora said. “You tell me.”
He snapped an eyebrow at her, then fell into another reverie, shadows from the firelight picking out the broken places in his face. She waited.
“It is a long story,” Aruendiel said warningly. Nora began to say that she didn’t mind, she liked long stories. Then she saw that she did not need to say anything. He grinned crookedly at her. “But first it is time for dinner.”
Aruendiel was silent at first, as they spooned up their barley soup and sipped the wine he himself had brought up from the cellar. (Some of the empty bottles in the far corner were not actually empty, if you knew how to examine them in the right way.) He was thinking back more than a century and half, sorting through his private stores of lost time and deciding what to bring into the light. The far past, that was the safest place to begin.
“In your world,” he suddenly said to Nora, “how did you decide on your course of studies—the stories and poems?”
“Because I was good at that sort of thing—some of it,” she said. “Because I was tired of being a cook. Because the life of a”—she searched for an Ors translation of
“What do you mean—you were good at some of it?” Aruendiel asked.
“Oh, I didn’t have any big ideas,” Nora said ruefully, thinking of that last conversation with Naomi. “I was good at reading and understanding individual poems, for instance, but I had trouble working them into some bigger framework.” She noticed that she was talking about grad school in the past tense.
Aruendiel did not seem displeased by her answer. “That may help explain your capacity for magic. One cannot practice real magic without an understanding of the individual things—
Ha, Naomi, did you hear that, Nora thought, but she did not allow this intriguing theory of Aruendiel’s to divert her from the main purpose of the conversation. “Did you always know that you had a capacity for real magic?” she asked. “Is that why you became a magician?”
“I trained as a wizard first,” Aruendiel said, parrying. “That was my parents’ decision—at least in the beginning.” He glanced at Nora and then went on before she could speak again: “Perhaps it would be best to begin with an account of my upbringing, my education.
“This castle, of course, is where I grew up. It had been the seat of my mother’s people for some six or seven centuries before I was born. My great-grandfather rebuilt the fortifications and the house in their present form, including this hall. He fought well in the Five Battles War, and was awarded lands as far south as the Old Ram River. You can see him hanging on the wall over there”—Aruendiel nodded toward the far end of the hall—“in the fur robe, wearing the gold that the king gave him.
“By the time my mother was of marriageable age, though, the line had dwindled. Her father had been killed in the Salt War, and she was the only heir. The estate was not as rich as it had been. Our wool did not fetch the
