The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

different world, I gather. It would be remiss to turn her out of doors without friends or connections.”

Mrs. Toristel acknowledged his apology with a slight bob. “A different world, sir? Well, that goes a long way to explaining the odd things she says. She’s been very quiet in general, so today when she threw the bowl I thought I’d better let you know.”

“She seems rational enough now, but it’s hard to say how these things will go,” Aruendiel said with some exasperation. Saving the life of an innocent was all very well, he thought; the aftermath of a rescue was often tedious and less satisfying. “I took enough Faitoren spells off her to make a cat bark. Just to be safe, you should get someone from the village to help you with the girl,” he added. “Who was that tall girl who was helping Toristel with the shearing? She took a firm line with the old ram. Very impressive.”

“That’s Morinen, Corlil’s daughter. Four brothers and she’s bigger than any of them.”

“That’s the one. Get her to handle the trays and such,” Aruendiel said, turning toward the door. “Again, I’m sorry for the extra trouble this has caused you.”

“Oh, this one’s easier than some of the folks who’ve come to you for treatment,” Mrs. Toristel said, covering the dough with a cloth.

“Oh? Do you mean the fellow who sang all the time?”

“No, he had a pleasant voice. I was thinking of the lady with the snakes in her hair.”

“Lady Asnoria Ulioran, with the Medusa syndrome? My dear Mrs. Toristel, you realize that none of those snakes were actually poisonous.”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Toristel. “They could still bite.”

Chapter 10

Dear Maggie,” Nora said aloud, but speculatively, as though she were uncertain of how her voice might sound. She was crouching in the reddish brown soil of the vegetable garden, pulling weeds among the long rows of turnips, beets, and parsnips. The back of her linen dress and the inside of her straw hat were already damp with sweat. It was chilly at night, though, even when the days were hot.

Maggie, it’s Nora. I can’t mail you a letter, so I’m just going to speak it aloud, well, because I wish I could talk to you. Also, I miss speaking English. I don’t even really know how long it’s been since I saw you. Six months? Longer?

I’m living in the country. Which country or how I got here—that’s complicated.

Somehow she had begun to get used to the idea that she was living in a world different from the one that she’d been born in—even if she still didn’t see how that was possible. Maybe EJ and his physics-loving brain could have explained it to her.

The place where I’m staying is a castle. Yes, I know, it sounds romantic.

Nora raised her head to look up the hill toward the high, windowless stone wall that wrapped tightly around the towers and buildings inside. The castle’s utilitarian function—keeping enemies out—was starkly clear, even though now, at midday, the heavy gates stood open.

To the north, she could glimpse the edge of the cliff on which the castle was built, and if she listened hard, she could hear the sound of the small river that flowed two hundred feet below. She turned to look in the opposite direction, at the unpaved road that wound from the castle gates past sloping fields and pastures to a small village, a collection of thatched roofs.

When Nora had first been able to walk again, after hobbling around for some weeks with a crutch, she’d had the notion of going to the village to try to find someone or something that might help her get home. A car, a telephone, might be too much to hope for, but there was no harm in seeing for herself whether she was as far from all modernity and civilization and rationality as she seemed to be. She gave that idea up the first time that she walked down the muddy lane that served as the village’s main street, passed a line of barefoot children waiting to draw water from a well, and caught a whiff of the latrines behind the whitewashed huts.

When you go through the castle gates, you find yourself in a courtyard with a big stone tower to your left. Straight ahead is the manor house. Go through the doors and you’re in the great hall.

It was the sort of cavernous gray space that Nora usually associated with parking garages or old train stations. The trussed roof was high enough for a second-floor gallery to crouch darkly at one end of the room. A long table ran almost the length of the hall, with benches on either side and a single tall, heavy chair at one end. On the wall parallel to the table was an enormous fireplace, big enough, Nora imagined, to give a convincing impression of the mouth of hell when it was in use.

The kitchen is next door. Stone flags, copper pots, a fireplace, a huge farm table. It would look spectacular in a decorating magazine. All it needs is a Viking refrigerator, an Aga, maybe some recessed lighting —and a good scrubbing.

Flies made graceful, unhurried sweeps through the open windows, as though they felt very much at home. In one corner was a red-and-white ceramic stove. Fresh straw on the floor, mixed with feathers and a few gnawed bones. Wrinkled sausages hung from the ceiling beams, as well as some strings of dried, fleshy things that looked very much like human ears and fingers. Mushrooms, Nora hoped.

My room is upstairs, along a hallway with other bedrooms.

One of the rooms must be the magician’s; she had heard his footsteps passing at night. Nora had an irrational fear that at some point she would be walking along the corridor and a door would open and he would come out, a long shadowy figure with pale eyes.

There are stables and barns behind the manor house. Yes, horses—you’d like that! And then there are the towers along the wall. Most of them are empty, with leaky roofs, except for the big one. But I haven’t been inside it yet.

Something about the construction of the tallest tower, the way its unmortared stones fit together, made Nora think that it must be the oldest part of the complex. It served the magician as some sort of workspace, judging from things that Mrs. Toristel had said.

What sort of room a magician might do his work in, Nora had no idea. She pictured, at random: a telescope, smoldering incense, one of those lacquered cabinets in which beautiful young ladies vanished, candles with pentagrams carved into them, the dried mushrooms from the kitchen. Then one night, getting ready for bed, she glanced out her window and saw a light in one of the tower windows. It was close enough, just across the courtyard, that she could see clearly what the tower room contained.

Books. An entire wall of books, their bindings rich and lustrous in the light from unseen candles. Nora stared hungrily for long minutes. It did her no good to remind herself that she could read none of them. Once she saw the magician’s lean figure shamble across the window; his hand plucked a book from the shelves and he disappeared. What was he reading? Perhaps something incredibly dull. It didn’t matter; Nora still felt the bite of envy. She used to be able to do that—sit in a clean, well-lighted room, choose a book from hundreds, start reading, and effortlessly take herself to another world. And now she was actually in another world, and she might never read another book again.

I’ve been here for a little over two months, as near as I can figure, given that the months here are different and the weeks have six days. But I’m still very much an outsider here. I’ve only gotten to know one person who’s even close to me in age.

A tall girl with wide shoulders had started bringing Nora her meals after the soup incident. She spoke Ors with an accent so much broader than that of either Mrs. Toristel or Aruendiel that it took several tries before Nora was sure that she had grasped the girl’s name correctly: Morinen. It was clear enough why she had replaced Mrs. Toristel. Once Nora asked for a knife to carve a piece of mutton, but Morinen shook her head. They did not trust her with sharp objects, evidently.

But Morinen had a ready smile and, unlike Mrs. Toristel, she had a propensity to linger, happy to talk to Nora in her near-incomprehensible speech about her brothers, her neighbors in the village, the goats she looked after, the weather, the crops, what Mrs. Toristel had said to her that morning. Nora’s Ors vocabulary included far more words having to do with dress, dancing, and court etiquette than with agriculture; listening to Morinen, she