The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

Aruendiel replied with a formal bow. “Tell your sister I am pleased to be of service to her.”

Nora translated, then broke off with an exclamation. A drop of hot wax had scorched her finger. Gingerly, she adjusted her grip on the candle. It had burned down to a stub so small it was hard to hold on to.

“What happens when the candle burns out?” she asked Aruendiel.

“What do you think? The spell is over.”

“I was afraid you would say that.” In English, to Ramona: “Honey, we don’t have much time left. The spell lasts only as long as the candle.”

“Then get another candle,” Ramona said promptly. “I want to know about the other world. How did you get there? Are there lots of magicians there? Can I come visit you? Are you going to stay there forever?”

“No! I’m going to come home as soon as I can. It might take some time. Aruendiel will help me.”

Ramona dropped her voice slightly. “Are you married to him, Nora?”

“No, certainly not.” Nora shook her head, coloring slightly. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

“You’re wearing a wedding ring,” Ramona said, pointing at Nora’s hand.

“That’s—well, it was a mistake,” Nora said. The candlewax nipped at her fingers again. Her light was shaky, dwindling.

“Are you married to anyone?”

“Listen, Ramona, please tell everyone I’m okay, will you?” She paused. “You probably shouldn’t mention the magic. It might worry them. I’ll be home—”

The last thing Nora saw as her candle’s flame dissolved into blackness was Ramona’s face, interested, alarmed. Then Ramona was gone.

Nora stood quietly for a moment, regaining her bearings. A floorboard creaked under her foot. The room was chilly, dark, scented with candle smoke. This, she could sense intuitively, was a real place, where things had weight and substance, unlike where she had just been. But it was not the real world, not at all.

Chapter 39

They won’t believe her, of course. They’ll think she’s fantasizing, that she’s crazy.” Nora paused. “You’re sure she’s the only one there who can understand the cat?” Aruendiel nodded. She groaned and went on: “And the real reason they won’t believe Ramona saw us is because they think I’m dead.

“Ramona thought I was a ghost, you know. You saw that picture of me on the shelf?” Aruendiel nodded again. “The other picture was my brother, EJ. At first I thought, how weird that she had his picture up. She never even knew him. But then I realized, it’s a shrine to her dead siblings.” Nora shuddered. “Was she upset when I evaporated in front of her?”

“She was agitated for a moment, yes,” Aruendiel said. “But she seems to be a child of some resolve and self-control,” he added, with a note of approval. “She asked me a question in your language. I believe she wanted to know whether you had returned to this world. I said yes. And then I extinguished my own candle.”

Nora spooned up some broth, then let it fall back into her bowl. They were eating dinner, an hour after a journey that, strictly speaking, had never happened at all.

“I must point out,” Aruendiel said, “that although it’s true that my spell made the cat intelligible only to those present at the time, it was a remarkable feat of magic. There are perhaps two other magicians now practicing who could cast a spell from one world into another with any hope of success.”

“Nifty,” Nora said in English. “Well, then,” she said in Ors, “can’t you do a spell that will let my family know that I’m alive and well? Is there a way to send messages between worlds? A letter in my handwriting—would they believe that?” She was asking herself as much as Aruendiel.

“A letter?” He frowned, as though still piqued at Nora’s failure to appreciate the power and artistry of the magic he’d performed on the cat, but then the notion of sending a letter to her world seduced his attention. He drummed his fingers slowly on the table. “You could do it with a twinning spell, what Morkin calls a correspondence spell. It puts the same object in two different places. A wax tablet, say—so that if you wrote on it, being in this world, the same words would appear on the tablet in the other world.”

“Really? Let’s do that!”

“The difficulty,” Aruendiel added, “is that the enchanted tablet would have to be physically introduced into your world.” He looked at her to make sure that she understood. “We would have to send it there the same way that you came here—through a gateway between worlds. So—”

“So in that case I could go back myself,” Nora finished in leaden tones. “All right, so when can I go back?”

“I have told you, I do not know.”

“There’s no sign of a gateway?” she demanded. “How often do you check?”

After a beat, Aruendiel said: “Frequently.” He added with a trace of waspishness: “I do not wish to detain you in this world any longer than need be.”

Nora bit back a sarcastic thanks, then tried to explain: “You saw them—they’re mourning me. They’re grieving. And I can’t do anything about it. Do you understand how awful that makes me feel? My father getting drunk, fighting with my sister—that’s because of me. He lost one child—”

“What did you think they were doing all this time, your people?”

“I don’t know! I thought they were basically fine. I was hoping not too much time had gone by over there. A couple of weeks, maybe.” Nora was aware as she spoke of how ridiculous this sounded.

“To be honest,” she added, “I didn’t think they would miss me so much. But—to see them like that, and not to be able to do anything. I feel like crap. I’ve been—” Nora shook her head, angry at herself, angrier at Aruendiel for providing the sly distraction of learning magic, making her forget what she owed to her family, her own world. “What was I thinking? And meanwhile they think I’m dead.”

“And what if they do?” Aruendiel asked. He pushed his empty bowl away. “Do you have some obligation to their grief?”

“Well, of course! They’re grieving for me.”

“What does that have to do with you? Their grief belongs to them alone.”

“But I don’t want them to grieve!”

“If you were dead, as they believe, you would owe them nothing.”

“What are you talking about?”

Aruendiel shrugged, one shoulder mounting higher than the other. “The dead should not have to answer to the claims of the living, even the sharpest grief.”

Nora sat in rebellious silence, considering what he had said. “Do you really believe that?” she asked. She was not sure exactly what he was getting at, but it had a flavor of callousness, or arrogance, that repelled her. “And I’m not dead, in any case. I do owe my family something, some reassurance. You said it could be years before I get back.”

Her tone was accusing. She could not soften it much, even as she made her request—it came out as more of a command—to do the observation spell again that night. She had the conviction that if she could just return to her father’s house, in whatever form, she could find some way to communicate with him or her stepmother.

Aruendiel refused. There was no guarantee, he pointed out, that they would reach her father’s house on the same night. Days or weeks could have passed already. And if her sister’s fever had gone, she might not be able to see them.

Furthermore, he added, Nora was distraught—a poor frame of mind for doing strong magic.

He was regretting, it was clear, that he had ever performed the observation spell in the first place.

“So I should just let my family think I’m dead?” she demanded at last. “Do you think that’s right?”

“For now, Nora, you do not have a choice,” he said wearily.

She sat in silence, thinking again of the twin photographs in her sister’s room, wondering why Ramona had chosen those two. The Nora in the photograph was grinning a bit too broadly, trying to cover up her disquiet at the prospect of figuring out what to do with the degree she had just earned. In EJ’s case, it was his school photo from tenth grade. The camera had caught him with his mouth slightly open, revealing the glint of braces, giving him an