spell.”
“I’ve always been pretty good at languages,” Nora said.
“Indeed,” he said. He sounded skeptical.
There was a long pause. Nora sighed and looked down at her bandaged body. “So I dreamed it all? It wasn’t real?”
“Oh, it was real enough. It wasn’t exactly as you believed it to be, though. That is Ilissa’s specialty. She traffics in illusion.”
“The baby was real?”
“Yes.”
She looked up directly into his eyes. “That was a terrible thing you said to me the other night.”
Another uneven shrug. “It was true.”
“But I wanted that baby so much.”
He frowned. After a moment he said, his voice cold: “I know what it is to lose a child. But this baby would have killed you.” There was another long silence. He pushed the chair back and stood up. “Well. Shall I remove the glamour, or are you content to remain as you are?”
“Oh,” she said slowly, “take it off.”
Aruendiel touched her chin with his finger, tilting her head back slightly. It seemed to Nora that his face darkened as he watched her, but she was more interested to find that she could feel a change in herself at once. The skin of her face seemed cooler, freer, despite the bandages. “That is better,” she said.
“Good,” he said, eyes narrowed. “Now drink your sleeping draft.”
Nora raised herself on the pillow and reached for the cup with her left hand. “Is it magic?” she asked, sniffing the cup suspiciously.
“Poppy juice and honey and some herbs. No magic. Except—” He took the cup from her, held it for an instant, then gave it back to her. The cup was warm now.
For an instant the idea of drinking from it made her faintly alarmed, almost queasy, but she fought back the unease and took a sip, feeling the heat of the drink against her tongue. She shivered.
“Thank you,” she said doubtfully.
He waited until she had finished, and then took cup and candle out of the room. In the darkness, Nora listened to the magician’s footsteps moving away, one foot dragging a little, and then she was asleep.
Several days passed quietly. The housekeeper appeared at intervals at Nora’s bedside, bringing more cups of the poppy-juice draft and, after a while, small meals on a wooden tray: broth, brown bread, stewed cherries. Nora ate obediently, but without any real enthusiasm. The food felt heavy and strange in her mouth. She had to remind herself to chew and swallow it.
Mrs. Toristel volunteered little on these visits, except for some terse commentary as she changed the dressings on Nora’s torso. “You were lucky these didn’t go deeper. Still inflamed.”
Nora looked down incuriously. The raw red lines etched across her stomach, sewn with coarse thread, were like a map of some alien terrain. “Should I see a doctor?” A real doctor, not a magician.
Mrs. Toristel seemed faintly surprised at the notion. “There used to be a doctor in the market town, old Farcap, but he died of the dry plague two years ago.”
Afterward, alone again, Nora went over in her mind what they had said. She still found it hard to believe that she could have learned a foreign language, the tongue the magician called Ors, without knowing it. Experimentally, she spoke to Mrs. Toristel in English the next time the housekeeper came into the room, but Mrs. Toristel gave her a blank stare. She tried some of the foreign languages she knew—French, German—but the other woman shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re saying,” Mrs. Toristel said.
Giving up, Nora responded in the same language, the words assembling themselves slowly in her brain: “It was nothing. Never mind.”
The poppy-juice drafts were smaller now and came only once a day. When Mrs. Toristel changed her dressings again, she seemed satisfied with how the wounds were healing. “Still hurt?” she asked, applying a new bandage.
Nora’s body was still sore, but the pain was duller, more familiar. “It doesn’t bother me,” Nora said, truthfully enough. After that, the poppy juice stopped altogether.
Time passed more slowly. She stared at the painted walls. Someone had taken away the mirror on the opposite wall and hung a picture for her to look at: a portrait of a pretty black-haired girl in a blue dress. The style was flat, a little crude, but the painter had managed to capture something of the sitter’s individuality. Her brown eyes looked into Nora’s, sometimes with pity, Nora thought, sometimes with mocking amusement.
She listened to sounds from outside: the barking of dogs; the fussing of chickens; the thunk of horses’ hooves; Mrs. Toristel, dry and quiet; the magician’s deep tones; other people whom she could not identify. Early in the morning, when it was still gray outside, she heard owls calling. One afternoon Mrs. Toristel stood directly under Nora’s window with another woman for half an hour engrossed in a disquisition on the current price and quality of flour, and Nora was hugely grateful for the diversion. The magician most often addressed his dogs, but she also heard him calling for Mrs. Toristel or her husband, who seemed to be in charge of the stables.
Nora had not seen Aruendiel since the night when he had rebandaged her face, which was something of a relief. Whenever she thought of how he had taken the cup into his hand and given it back to her steaming hot, she felt uncomfortable. The quick, casual gesture, replayed in her mind, frightened her because she understood only that it was impossible. Then there was her flight through the air, also hard to explain. In fact, her mind shied away from even trying. Either there was a rational explanation—or not, Nora thought.
Remembering the poppy juice, she had a refreshing inspiration. She had emptied some dull opiate to the drains, had she not? And dreamed a storybook world for herself. Flying through the air—a hallucination. So was the monster that attacked her. The man she had married. Ilissa, and all those strange, beautiful people. The wonderful clothes. Having a baby. Some element of wish fulfillment fueling the fantasies, probably. (How pathetic was that?)
At the thought of the baby, though, she felt sadness deep within her body, like the slow fatigue of illness. There was no baby, it was just a dream, Nora thought resolutely, but her flesh said otherwise. Then there was the gold ring on her left hand. Still, what did a ring prove, one way or the other? She tried to pull it off with her other, bandaged hand, but she couldn’t get a good grip, and the ring refused to budge.
She found herself unexpectedly slipping into long crying jags. One day Mrs. Toristel, passing outside the door, came in to see what was wrong. Nora only shook her head mutely, overwhelmed at the idea of even trying to explain. Then she noticed what Mrs. Toristel was carrying.
“Oh, you have some books!” she said, sniffling, sitting up. “May I see them?”
“Oh, no, they’re the master’s—” Mrs. Toristel said, but Nora had already taken a book out of the housekeeper’s hands. It was a small leather-bound volume, the covers embossed with two dragons facing each other across an oval seal. Sitting upright on their hind legs, they resembled two small dogs begging for scraps.
Nora leafed through the book greedily. Strings of elegant brushstrokes climbed the pages, an unknown alphabet that made as much sense to her as a handful of broken twigs. “Another one?” she asked. After a second’s hesitation, Mrs. Toristel opened up a second volume, holding it out of Nora’s reach. The same as the first book, except this one was printed, the cryptic letters roughly carved into woodblock.
“This is Ors?” Nora demanded. Mrs. Toristel nodded, frowning. “I can’t read it. I can’t read at all,” Nora said. “I’m illiterate.” She began to laugh, then to weep again.
Later the same afternoon, Mrs. Toristel came back with some clothes and spread them out on the bed for Nora to see. A pair of jeans, a T-shirt, some underclothing. “Losi in the village, that does the wash, she had quite a scare.” The housekeeper’s tone was faintly accusatory. “I gave her what you were wearing when you came, a nightie. Losi said she put it to soak and when she came back, it had changed into these things.”
Nora recognized her Eno River festival T-shirt. “How did these get here? I wasn’t wearing them when I
