tell her. She would be so happy to hear it, you know.”
“It is difficult,” he said with some heaviness. “I brought her and Toristel here because they had lost their livelihood through no fault of their own—because of their loyalty to me, in fact. Because of that and the ties of blood, I felt some responsibility. There were complexities I should have foreseen, perhaps—but it does not matter, they have served me well.”
“They certainly have. Mrs. Toristel works incredibly hard, and she’s not young anymore. I hope you’re paying her well.”
“Well enough,” he said. “They have never complained to me.”
“They wouldn’t,” Nora said.
She and Aruendiel were in sight of the castle now. Aruendiel began walking faster, perhaps eager to escape further interrogation. Nora saw, with some chagrin, that he had managed to distract her, with his revelation about Mrs. Toristel, from the origin of real magic and Wurga’s identity.
“You told me once that all of the female magicians you’d known were good magicians,” Nora said. “But Wurga was only a magician ‘of sorts,’ you said.”
“Her training was haphazard,” Aruendiel said dismissively. “She would have improved with more practice.”
That seemed to be all he would say on the subject. But when they were almost at the castle gate, he checked himself, wheeling to face Nora.
“It is hard to become a good magician, Mistress Nora, but it is not any more difficult to become a good female magician. At least, that has been my experience. Do you understand?”
Nora nodded, shivering a little in the cold air. “Yes, I do.”
“I fear I have been remiss as a teacher today,” he went on. “I have not told you what you asked to know about my first researches into real magic. And in truth, it is a story that I would rather entrust to you than to anyone. Not least because you may have special use for it.”
Nora considered this, not seeing exactly what he meant. “So why can’t you tell me?”
Aruendiel sighed. “I have kept this story to myself all these years, not wishing it to be known, and yet I do not want it to be entirely lost, either. I would cut out my tongue before I told the history of my life to such a fool as Hirgus Ext, but he was right to ask me about the origins of true magic. I must ask your forgiveness, Nora, and your patience. I will tell you this story—someday. I promise you this.”
She wanted to argue—why not now, she could keep any secret he asked—but the seriousness of his expression dissuaded her. She tried to ignore the sudden dread that rose inside her, the fear of what he was not telling her. Could it be worse than killing your wife? “All right,” she said. “I understand.”
When they reached the castle, Nora saw that the bonfire had been doused, but there was a dark, upright, spiky shape in the courtyard, a little taller than a man. As they came closer, she recognized it as a fir tree.
“What is that tree doing here?” she asked.
“The tree is for you,” Aruendiel said. “So that you may get in some practice in light-conjuring. I had Toristel set it up.” When Nora did not respond, he added, with some impatience, “Did you not say that it is the custom in your world to garland a tree with lights at the time of the New Year?”
For some reason, something that Nora had told him about her own winter holiday had stuck with him. Perhaps he had seen similar trees in Chicago. She found she was smiling. “Oh, yes,” she assured him. “It’s called a Christmas tree.”
Aruendiel flung up one hand as though to show that he had no interest in whatever the tree was called. “Very well, then. Begin.”
As a homework assignment, it was a challenging one. She had conjured light before, but she had never tried to make dozens of smaller lights at once. And the tiny, ghostly flames refused to stay in place, slipping off the tree’s needles to hover like winter fireflies. Aruendiel pointed out that she had left out the spell’s locative step, and she had to start again. Then, as she was getting the hang of it, daubing light along the branches, he added another twist, making her pull illumination from two different sources, the Toristels’ fire as well as the kitchen grate.
When Nora was done, she stepped back to look critically at her handiwork. She had not managed to make all the lights the same size—some were like sparks, some were the size of apricots—but she decided she was pleased with the effect. The lights borrowed from the kitchen burned slow and reddish, like coals; the others flared and flickered. Probably Mrs. Toristel was poking her fire. Recognizably, it was a Christmas tree, although it was a wilder, less cozy, more restive creature than anything you could assemble by plugging in a string of electric lights and throwing them over a tree in your living room.
“What do you think?” she asked.
Aruendiel frowned, staring at the tree, and she could tell that he was tallying up her errors: the false start, the various-size flames (“poor control”), the time it had taken her to finish, and the other mistakes of which she was not even aware.
“It’s very pretty,” he said.
On an impulse, Nora groped for Aruendiel’s hand and squeezed it. “Merry Christmas, Aruendiel,” she said in English. “Happy New Year,” in Ors.
Faster than thought, his fingers slid around hers. He looked down quickly, meeting her gaze, and in his startlement she saw a soft flash of hope, of wanting.
She saw with sudden emotion that she could follow the path her eyes had made and put her face near his, her lips on his lips. He was so close. It would not be difficult at all. In the glow of the tree, his gray eyes watched, gentle, restless oceans waiting to engulf her.
Nora froze, looked away. She gave his hand another, more abrupt squeeze and dropped it, rocking back on her heels, away from him.
“A prosperous New Year to you, Mistress Nora,” Aruendiel said crisply.
They stood there for another few minutes, looking at the tree, talking—Nora could not for the life of her remember afterward what they talked about—until Aruendiel stamped his feet in the snow and turned to go inside. At the door of the manor house, he paused.
“Ask the Toristels to come over, will you?” he said. “I will have a New Year’s toast with them.”
He spent a good two hours that night drinking hot wine with the Toristels in the great hall. Aruendiel warmed the wine himself, not on the fire. Probably the Calanian protocol for generating heat, Nora thought. She did not ask him. She drank a goblet, but it did not shake the chill she felt.
PART FOUR
The kiss that Nora had not given Aruendiel on New Year’s Day proved to be more durable than she would have imagined. It remained with her, invisible, inert, not gaining power but not losing it either. In those winter months she felt as though she were wearing it like a locket on a chain that would not break, and she was thankful that Aruendiel never noticed it.
Or seemed not to. Lessons had resumed. She spent half of every day in Aruendiel’s company, but there was a reserve between them, an empty place that neither tried to traverse, although Nora found herself watching him across it. He no longer asked her to accompany him on walks into the woods, although he did not refuse if she asked to come. He did not talk about his past life again except in the most impersonal way—explaining how he had come to use a certain spell for the first time, for instance. The translation of
“We’re only halfway through, there’s much more to come,” Nora said, feeling the weight of the lost kiss. Elizabeth had just rejected Darcy. (Was it Nora’s imagination, or had Aruendiel’s face set into harsher, stoic lines
