began to pick up other things—like the twelve different Ors words for sheep and the apparently inexhaustible number of ways to indicate whether it was likely to rain.
Morinen was curious about Nora, too. Her arrival in a gust of wind had been discussed widely in the village. Still distrustful of her own memories, Nora said only that she was far from home, that she had been a captive, and that Aruendiel had helped her escape.
That shut down further inquiry: The one subject that Morinen was reluctant to discuss at any length was the magician. “I don’t exactly know,” she said when Nora asked how he had acquired his limp or his scars or even how long he had lived in the castle. Once Morinen mentioned the handsome blacksmith in the next village; part of his attraction seemed to be that he was the only single man for miles around taller than she was. “There’s the magician,” Nora pointed out teasingly. Morinen didn’t laugh; she looked anxious. Nora tried to smooth over what was obviously a bad joke by saying, “He’s rather old for you, though,” and then Morinen seemed even more uncomfortable.
Nora calculated that if she went to the bathhouse late enough so that the villagers would be fixing or eating supper, there would be no one to see the scars on her face and body. She was tired of being stared at. Every time she went to the village, even with Mrs. Toristel, she could feel the eyes of the villagers on her and hear occasional whispers as she passed.
“What are they looking at?” she asked Mrs. Toristel once, as they walked back to the castle.
“They hardly see any strangers, dear, and they know you’ve come from another world.”
“What is there for them to look at, though?” Nora protested. “I don’t look that different from them.” She was dressed the same, in shabby wool or linen dresses; she was only a little taller; she wasn’t much cleaner. True, her teeth were straight, and she had all of them, but that hardly seemed like a reason to stare.
“There is something different about you, though,” Morinen said when Nora brought up the same point to her.
“What do you mean? Is it the scars?”
“Oh, no, everyone has seen scars.” Morinen thought for a while. “No, it’s something about the way you move or the way you look at things. It’s different.”
“How different?”
“Ah, it’s so clear, but it’s hard to put it into words. You seem so bold.”
“Bold?” Nora was pleased, but had to admit: “That doesn’t sound like me.”
“Well, you don’t act like a woman. You act like you’re not afraid of men. You look them right in the eye, and you don’t drop your voice, and you speak to them like you’re a man.”
Nora was speechless for a second. She always said hello to the village men she passed. “You don’t act as though you’re afraid of men, either.”
“Well, I’m not,” Morinen said with a laugh. “Most of the men are afraid of me, ’cause I’m so big. Ma is always after me to be more ladylike, not to talk so much in front of the men.”
“Why shouldn’t you talk in front of them?”
“Yes, well, Ma isn’t known for holding her tongue, either. But she talks this certain way. Sort of quiet and respectful and cautious, like I said, and that makes it all right.”
“So I act too much like a man, is that right?”
“Not like a man. More like a little boy.”
Nora laughed out loud. But in the bathhouse, naked among the other women, she still felt self-conscious about the long, rough scars on her torso. Some version of her stay among the Faitoren had circulated, that was evident. Some of the other women looked sympathetic; others seemed almost amused by the marks on her body. “What did you expect?” their sly glances seemed to ask. In all the stories in literature and mythology about women being offered as tribute to beasts or monsters, no one ever spelled out exactly what that meant, or what it might be like for the woman afterward.
Helping a merchant in Leorica get rid of the sea monsters that were wrecking his ships, Mrs. Toristel had said.
Nora pulled a couple of weeds as she considered what to say next. If she said straight out, “He’s a magician,” Maggie—even imaginary Maggie—would doubt her sanity.
She thought about the last time she’d seen Aruendiel, the day he left. She’d been sitting in the great hall when Aruendiel came in, Mrs. Toristel trotting behind him. “—a few weeks at sea,” he was saying. “I expect to return before the harvest. It’s probably the work of a sea hag, but the ocean turns up all kinds of quirky magic. We shall see.”
“Yes, sir, I’ll pack some of your winter things, for the damp,” Mrs. Toristel said distractedly. “You’ll want the new boots that Cobbler just sent over. And before you go, Big Faris and Lumper from the village came here, saying there’s grasshoppers in the wheat.”
Aruendiel groaned. “Grasshoppers! Can they not raise a single crop without my aid?”
“They were wondering, sir, if you would be so kind as to send some birds to eat the grasshoppers, the way you did last year.”
“I can do that, but then what? Last year, they complained about the birds after the grasshoppers were gone. How about this: I’ll turn the villagers into crows, and they can eat the damned grasshoppers.”
He turned and walked straight into the wall. The gray stone engulfed his frame like water, and he was gone.
After Mrs. Toristel had gone upstairs, Nora went over to the wall where the magician had disappeared and touched the freckled granite. It was solid and cool beneath her fingertips. She put her ear to the wall and thought she heard a distant, retreating footstep.
Into the silence that followed, Nora said quickly: “Open Sesame.” Then, louder: “Open Sesame!” She waited.
The wall waited with her, quiet, impermeable. Nora gave the granite an experimental smack with the side of her fist. Then she rubbed her hand ruefully. It stung.
Later that day, after Aruendiel had ridden away, she brought herself to ask Mrs. Toristel whether she, too, ever found the magic unsettling. “I saw him walk straight through the wall! Doesn’t that bother you? And I heard what he said about turning the villagers into crows.”
“Ah, yes, the wall, that’s the entrance to his tower,” Mrs. Toristel said, unperturbed. “There used to be a door there, and then he had it sealed up, and now you can only get into the tower by magic. Safer that way, he says. I’ve gone through that wall myself many times. It’s like walking through smoke. But that’s only if he wants to let you in.”
“Would he really turn those people into crows?”
“That was his jest. Although, it’s true, the villagers would not think it funny.”
Actually, there seemed to be surprisingly little magic in daily use in the magician’s household. “Why doesn’t he actually do something useful with his magic?” Nora asked. “Why do
“He would love that as much as killing grasshoppers. Now that you say it, I do remember, when I first went to work for him, I thought it would be an easy berth, with him being a magician. I thought there’d be all kinds of, oh, spirits and demons to do the hard jobs, or maybe I’d learn some spells and my work would be done. It wasn’t that way at all. Same old sweeping and scrubbing as at home. But there was a bigger staff in those days, at Lusul.”
