The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

undeserved appearance of dullness. It was an awful picture, really. Maybe those two photos were the only ones that Ramona could find to fit the frames.

“So I’m dead to them,” Nora said resentfully. The phrase did not have the same resonance in Ors that it did in English. “I suppose there’s no chance that I’m really dead, is there? You said no once—but I did give Ramona a scare.”

“Of course not,” Aruendiel said, his expression softening. “You are very much alive.”

His assurance relieved but did not mollify her. Nora cast about for a new direction in which to loose her roiling guilt and anger. “You were dead once,” she said, with a sense that her words would burn. “Really dead. Isn’t that right?”

The gray gaze might have slipped sideways for an instant—impossible to say for sure. “Where did you hear that? More tittle-tattle from Semr?”

“Hirizjahkinis told me.”

“Ah, Hirizjahkinis,” he said brusquely. “She should scratch her own fleabites and leave my affairs in peace.”

“She helped bring you back to life.”

“She’s proud of that.”

“Why shouldn’t she be?” Nora said, pressing for something more, not sure what.

“It was Euren the Wolf’s magic, more than hers. And as a piece of magic, it was—well, only adequate. It took years for me to recover from my injuries.” With a grimace, he added: “Even now, I am not healed completely.”

“Well, you’re alive,” Nora said, irked on Hirizjahkinis’s behalf by his lack of evident gratitude.

“They should have spared themselves their trouble. There was no good reason to resurrect me,” Aruendiel said in the tone of one stating an unvarnished fact. “They would have won the war without me, eventually. I’d lived a long time. I had no close ties. My children were gone by then, even my grandchildren. My wife was dead. I had killed her not long before.”

He added the last piece of information deliberately, as though Nora might have forgotten it.

“Yes, you’d mentioned that,” she said coolly. Then, her voice rising slightly, she added: “That’s something I can’t figure out, by the way. I just don’t understand. That you would kill someone weaker than yourself.” The thought of Aruendiel stabbing his wife had become more terrible over time, not less. “It seems”—she chose her words carefully—“dishonorable.”

Aruendiel’s eyes narrowed. “She was the one who’d behaved with dishonor.”

“So it was all right to kill her?”

“I was very angry,” he said flatly.

“Is that an excuse?”

“Of course not. You asked for an explanation. She cried and clung to his body. What did she expect?” Aruendiel’s voice was taut. “That I would spare him, the one who stole my wife from me? It was my right to challenge him. I used no magic. It was a fair fight. I won. And then she wept, she screamed. She was holding him, her belly swollen with his child. It was as though she did not even see me. I put the blade between her ribs and walked out of that cursed room.”

Nora thought of Aruendiel’s swordplay with the rope-and-broomstick puppet in this very hall: snick snick snick thrust. She looked straight at him, taking in every line of the harsh, graven face; unable to think of what to say, she fell back on Shakespeare. “Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men?”

“More men? She betrayed me.” He added abruptly: “She loved him.”

“Well, presumably—”

Aruendiel fixed her with a pale glare. “You fail to understand. She loved him. I meant to free her from enchantment—but there was no enchantment. No spells of any kind infecting her heart. She’d gone with him of her own free will. It was the cleverest and cruelest part of Ilissa’s revenge.”

“Ilissa?” Nora asked.

“Of course. It was all her doing.”

“You stabbed your wife.”

“Ilissa set the trap,” Aruendiel said. “It was her trickery. She hated me. She had been my mistress,” he added, his voice hard.

“You told me that once. So you think,” Nora said, not bothering to keep the disbelief out of her tone, “Ilissa arranged for your wife to fall in love with someone else?”

“Exactly.” He was silent, then spoke with a kind of grim eagerness, as though he had made up his mind to advance through hostile territory no matter what the cost: “From the moment my marriage was announced, I feared Ilissa would strike at my wife. I took precautions. I guarded Lusarniev with the most powerful protection spells I could devise. I watched to ensure that she was under no kind of enchantment.

“When Lusarniev gave birth to a stillborn boy, I thought instantly of Ilissa. But to all signs the child had died of natural causes. It was the same when Lusarniev miscarried again, and then again. The third time, I even called in another magician, my friend Nansis Abora. He waited upon my wife and then told me privately that he could find no enchantment, and he confirmed what the doctors had said, that she should regain her strength before she became pregnant again.

“Lusarniev herself was terribly fearful of bearing another dead child. So I absented myself from the marriage bed until she could grow stronger. It was not strictly necessary. There are magical means to keep babies from coming. But it made Lusarniev calmer in her mind.

“And then one day I came home to find my wife gone. She had left with Melinderic, a knight attached to my household.

“He was not much older than my wife. His grandfather had been one of my comrades in the Pernish wars. I had made Melinderic my principal deputy for the sake of the old connection and because he was intelligent, forthright, reliable. I trusted him completely.

“For all the care that I took to make sure that Ilissa had not enchanted my Lusarniev, I never thought to examine Melinderic.”

“You’re saying that Ilissa put a love spell on him?” Nora asked.

“Yes, of course,” Aruendiel said impatiently. “You should know something about Faitoren love spells. It was quite powerful.”

“And your wife—” Against her will, Nora found herself believing him. Ignorant of magic, Lady Lusarniev would have known only that the young man was in love with her. And knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain.

“So he seduced her,” Aruendiel said. “And then there was a child on the way.” He laughed starkly. “All my concern for my wife’s health went to good account, did it not? She only wished to avoid bearing a child to me.” More quietly, he added: “I would have staked my life on her honor. I had never known her to do anything before that was not correct and graceful.”

At these last words, Nora felt sudden dislike for the dead woman. She tried to ignore it in the cause of female solidarity. “But your life wasn’t at stake, was it?” she said. Aruendiel did not answer. “I feel even sorrier for her now,” Nora said staunchly. “She died because of a love affair that wasn’t even real. He only loved her because of magic.”

“Her feeling for him was real enough,” Aruendiel said acidly. “She made me a laughingstock. People said I should have known better, after all the times that I’d cuckolded other men. But—” He shook his head. “That was exactly why I never imagined she’d be unfaithful. The wives I’d seduced were discontented. Their husbands neglected them. Lusarniev—we’d been married only three years. I would have sworn she was completely happy to be my wife. I paid her every attention, and she ranked among the greatest ladies of the kingdom.”

“Why did you marry her?”

“Why?” He seemed surprised by the question. “She was precisely the kind of woman I intended to marry. An excellent lineage. A lovely face. She was only eighteen when I met her, but she had a composure and bearing that I admired, that came from being carefully brought up. She knew how to behave at court, how to run an estate. I understood the sort of people that she came from. She was perfectly suited to be my wife.”

“It sounds as though you were hiring her for a job,” Nora said tartly. “What did she think about your being a magician?”