Again, Aruendiel asked himself why he had just told Nora this. Well, she’d expressed some curiosity about Old Semr, the day they rode through it. Still, if he wasn’t careful, he would lead her right back to the Pir River. Somehow, as he talked with her, the distant past seemed less distant; he almost forgot how much he had lost there.
Aruendiel stood up abruptly, flinching as his back straightened. He was suddenly aware that he would like very much to stay and keep talking—in fact, he realized with some alarm, he wanted nothing so much as to tell the whole long tale, to share it piece by piece with Nora and watch her turn it over in that lively, attentive, compassionate mind of hers. But that temptation was also why he could not tell her.
“What? It’s not late.”
“Late enough. I am growing tired—it is no small thing for a man as old as I am to recall the details of his earliest youth.”
Nora looked up at him, her clean young face pleasant and watchful. “There’s a lot you haven’t told, though. How you discovered real magic . . . what was going on with your sister that wasn’t quite right . . . what happened to your brother Aruendic . . . or the peasant boy?”
“The peasant boy?”
“The one who was at school with you. Odl Naxt’s other star pupil.”
“Oh, him,” Aruendiel said, a splash of relief in his voice. “You’ve met him, as a matter of fact. That was my old friend Nansis Abora.”
“The magician we stayed with on the way back from Semr? The one doing time-travel work—who gave us those preserves!”
“After we left school, he went back to his village, but our paths crossed again, much later. Nansis was one of the first to practice real magic with me. He has a very disciplined, patient intellect, and a good head for numbers. There are not many magicians who could even attempt the kind of astronomical magic that he is pursuing. He worked in Semr for a while—he had a spell as the king’s chief magician—but he retired to the country as soon as he could. It sometimes seems to me that Nansis gleans more satisfaction from digging in that garden of his than from practicing magic.
“Aside from that,” Aruendiel added, “he is not quite as great a clod as I first thought him.”
Nora came downstairs the next morning to find that Aruendiel had ridden away at daybreak to pay a Null Days call. He was visiting someone named Lernsiep in the next valley—an old friend in ill health, Mrs. Toristel said.
He was away the next day, too. As afternoon turned into evening with no sign of him, Nora grew uneasy. It was the last of the Null Days. Tomorrow was New Year’s Day. If he returned too late, would he pick up the thread of his story again? She had a half-superstitious fear that he was telling her as much as he had about his past only because it was the holidays, because he was bored, because officially this slow, dark stretch of time did not exist. If he did not finish the tale tonight, he would never finish it for her.
Well, she thought, at least I know most of the story. But what was that about being blamed for his brother’s death? Nora ladled out some warm soup for herself, saving the rest for Aruendiel, then took up
The water clock in the kitchen had been stopped for the Null Days, but surely it was not so late yet. Nora laid another log on the fire, put on a second shawl, and went back to the book and her tablet. After a while, she put down her stylus and did the translation in her head, not bothering to write it down. Then she put her head down on the table for a moment’s rest.
The touch on her shoulder was so light, almost shy, that it hardly roused her. Then she realized that she was very cold, with an evil crick in her neck, and she opened her eyes.
“Mistress Nora, is anything amiss?” Aruendiel asked sharply. “Why are you sitting here so late?”
“I was waiting for you,” Nora said. Her voice was slow with sleep. She tried to sound more alert: “I was just sitting up for a little while.”
Aruendiel’s face was shadowed. “It will be dawn in a few hours. You should go to bed, or you will risk a chill.”
Nora nodded, feeling suddenly foolish. Aruendiel was still in his traveling cloak, a trace of snow caked to his shoulders. He might have been riding all night. She stood up, flexing her neck carefully, and turned to go upstairs. Aruendiel walked beside her, his gait more labored than usual. “How is your friend, the one you were visiting?” she asked, to be polite.
“He is dying,” Aruendiel said.
An awkward pause, which she tried to fill with some sympathetic words. Aruendiel did not respond. After a moment, she asked: “What is he dying of?”
“The wasting disease. There are unnatural growths throughout his body—they are draining his strength. He is as thin as a winter branch.”
“Oh,” she said, understanding. “That. It is common in my world.”
“How do your doctors treat it?” he asked with a gleam of interest.
“Surgery, or drugs to kill the growths. Can you treat it with magic?”
He shook his head. “I have tried, but the growths returned. Lernsiep helped save my life once, years ago. And now I cannot save his. He says he does not mind so much. He has lived long enough, he says.” Aruendiel gave a sour chuckle.
“Well—” Nora looked down. You couldn’t force someone to stay alive, if the person was already dead, or as good as dead. She had surrendered to that unyielding logic after watching the vacant face in the hospital bed, the blinks and twitches that had no meaning. “But you’ll miss him,” she said.
“Certainly.” They were upstairs now, in front of Nora’s door. “I suppose that is why Lernsiep went to the trouble of saving
“I would think so. You don’t sound very grateful.”
“No?” Aruendiel limped down the corridor without saying good night.
In the morning, the sky was so thickly bandaged with clouds that it was hard to tell the exact moment the sun rose. Standing in the courtyard, Nora watched the gray air brighten slowly, the other figures around her accumulating color and detail. Mrs. Toristel whispering to her daughter; her grandson yawning; the young black ram twisting suspiciously at the end of the rope held by Mr. Toristel; Aruendiel standing silent, holding a knife with a short, triangular blade.
At some point Aruendiel decided that it was dawn—either through some magical means or simply because he was tired of waiting. He nodded to Mr. Toristel, and the other man yanked the ram toward the magician so quickly the animal’s hooves skidded on the icy cobbles. Aruendiel bent over the animal; it struggled as he tilted its head back. Nora looked away. When she looked back, the basin that Mrs. Toristel held under the sheep’s throat was already half-full of blood, and Aruendiel was walking rapidly back toward the house as though he wished to speak to no one.
For most of the day, Nora worked in the kitchen, as the dead ram became roast mutton. She wondered if Aruendiel would summon her for a lesson, now that the Null Days were over, but she heard nothing from him. He spent some hours in the tower—Mrs. Toristel carried up a plate of mutton to him—and then he went out on horseback.
In the afternoon there was a bonfire in the courtyard, all the evergreen branches that visitors had brought during the Null Days. Nora watched as they burned with a slow angry crackle. People from the village came and went, laughing, drinking the hot ale that Mr. Toristel ladled out for them. There was a sheen of satiety and contentment on their faces. It was the one day in the year when everyone ate meat, everyone was alike, whether
