The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

True, Mrs. Toristel had looked a shade alarmed the first time she came into the kitchen and found Nora holding a knife, slicing plums. With a deliberate movement—hoping to impress the housekeeper with her sanity— Nora put the knife down and said mildly that she had smelled the vinegar syrup on the stove and seen the baskets of fruit on the table, only some of it peeled and sliced, and would it be all right if she helped make the preserves?

Mrs. Toristel watched Nora closely at first and did not hesitate to offer precise directions on how plum skins should be removed, but by the end of the afternoon she had unbent enough to fill Nora in on the state of Mr. Toristel’s rheumatism, the two or three most misguided ways of making preserves, and Morinen’s prospects of marrying the blacksmith. (Poor, according to Mrs. Toristel. The miller’s daughter had her eye on him, too.)

“You’re not slow with the knife,” Mrs. Toristel said, with approval. “You must have done this kind of work before.”

A whole set of questions was folded into that statement. “I worked as a cook, a couple of years ago,” Nora said. “Before I was, um, a fairy princess.”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Toristel, as though this were a well-established career progression. “Well, I can always do with some help in the kitchen. As long as you don’t strain yourself, now,” she added severely. “I don’t want him blaming me if your leg won’t heal properly.”

It was clear who him was. Nora remembered the way the English department secretary always referred to the department chair simply as “she”: “Oh, hello. You’ll have to wait. She’s running a little behind.”

And I’m back to the magician again, Nora thought, twisting a stubborn root out of the earth.

I still don’t know much about Aruendiel—Lord Aruendiel. Mrs. Toristel has told me a little. No family. A widower. I’m not sure how old he is. She’s worked for him her whole life, I gather.

Morinen would never have lasted a day at Lusul, she was a good-hearted girl, but far too careless, Mrs. Toristel observed irritably one day, after Morinen let the bread burn.

“What’s Lusul? A city?” Nora asked. She had heard Mrs. Toristel mention the name before.

“Lusul was his estate,” Mrs. Toristel corrected her. “Very grand it was, with good farms all around, not like this place. Plenty of staff to keep it up. My job was to keep the fires going and the rooms swept and dusted in just one wing of the house. There was another girl for the other wing, and another for the bedrooms. And I had to keep all the vases filled with fresh flowers. Her ladyship was so fond of flowers. That was the first magic I ever saw his lordship do, growing roses and such in the middle of winter.” Mrs. Toristel’s wrinkled face brightened. Nora asked how she got the job. “Ah, that was a kindness of his lordship and his wife’s. My father had died, and I was the oldest, twelve. We had an old connection with his lordship’s family, and when we heard that he would be getting married and living at Lusul, my mother wrote to him and asked if there might be a place for me in the household.

“Well, she didn’t write to him,” Mrs. Toristel corrected herself. “She had one of our neighbors, who was in trade, write to him and read the letter to her when it came back. It was her ladyship who wrote back to say yes. I said to my mother how funny it was to think of a woman writing a letter, but she said that great ladies learned how to read and write, some of them.”

Nora couldn’t help saying that she could read and write, but Mrs. Toristel only looked sharply at her. “When I showed you those books, you said you couldn’t read them.”

“I can read perfectly well in my own language. I’ve spent years in school, in fact.”

“I thought you said you’d been a cook.”

“I’ve done that, too.”

“Well, I know how to read, too, a bit,” Mrs. Toristel said with a sniff. “The master taught me, so that I could keep the accounts for him. But there’s no call to read or write unless you’re a magician or a lawyer or a merchant, maybe.”

Job opportunities for English professors: zero. What did it signify, Nora reflected grimly, that she would wind up in a place—real or imagined—where she could not practice the occupation for which she had spent years preparing? But something else that Mrs. Toristel said had caught her attention. “So his wife—the Lady Aruendiel —”

“Lady Lusarniev Aruendielan.” Mrs. Toristel embarked on a brief explanation of family names and titles among the aristocracy. “All right, I see,” Nora said when the other woman was finished. “What of her? Is she—” She paused politely, but with something wriggling urgently at the back of her memory. Something she’d heard back in that hazy time among the Faitoren.

“Ah, well,” Mrs. Toristel said, a little stiffly, “sad to say, their marriage didn’t last long.” Nora looked at her inquisitively, but Mrs. Toristel pressed her lips together, as though to keep the answer from tumbling out. “I don’t like to gossip about his lordship’s private affairs.”

“Oh, no, of course not,” said Nora.

“It’s not what he pays me for.”

“Certainly not.”

“There are some who’d tell you all kinds of terrible stories about him.”

“That’s too bad,” Nora said sympathetically. “Of course, if there are terrible rumors out there, it’s good to know the truth.”

“Well, all I’ll say,” said Mrs. Toristel with a nod, “is that some people take their marriage vows less seriously than others. It causes a lot of heartache, but that’s the way of the world.”

“I know it,” Nora said. She pulled at the ring on her finger, as she had gotten into the habit of doing. As usual, it stayed put—this was starting to be seriously annoying. “So he—?”

“No, she,” Mrs. Toristel corrected. “Devastated, he was. He came home and she wasn’t there. Gone. Off with another man. One of his closest friends.

“I remember how his lordship walked into the house that day, never suspecting a thing. He’d been in Semr, I think, at court. The other servants made themselves scarce. No one wanted to tell him she was gone.

“I didn’t know any better. I was just a child myself, and I didn’t quite realize what it meant, that Lady Lusarniev had ridden away the day before with that young man. Oh, I knew it wasn’t quite right, but I couldn’t believe that her ladyship might be unfaithful to him.” She lowered her voice slightly. “To such a famous magician. Think about it. How would you even hope to keep something like that a secret?”

“She did, evidently,” Nora observed.

Mrs. Toristel nodded. “Lord Aruendiel asked if I’d seen her ladyship and when I told him that she had gone away with the knight, his own friend, I saw his face change. I saw the anger building in his eyes—oh, I never want to see that again. I’d been dusting the woodwork, and it came to me that he would turn me into dust, too. But he just said, very courteously, ‘Thank you, Ulunip,’ and then he left the room.”

“Ulunip?”

“That’s my given name,” Mrs. Toristel said. “A good Pelagnian name. It means ‘Little Rabbit.’ You don’t hear it around here very much.”

“Then what happened?”

“There’s not much to say. He left Lusul that day, and I don’t believe he ever went back.”

“Did he go after his wife?’

“All I know is that he left, the estate was closed up a few months later, and I lost my job there. We heard he’d gone into the wars. There were all kinds of dreadful rumors floating around—that she was killed, he was killed—but when he asked me to come work for him here, it was obvious that he wasn’t dead, even if he’d been terribly injured in the war. I never put much stock in rumors.”

“But what did happen to his wife? Maybe she actually was”—Nora cleared her throat—“dead.”

“Well, yes, she went to the gods, poor lady. He told me that when I arrived here, the first day. I could tell he didn’t want to say anything more, so I didn’t ask. It was none of my business, anyway.”

“Still, I would think you’d want to know what happened to her. For your own peace of mind.”

“That’s what Toristel said. He wasn’t happy to come here at first. He was like you, mistrustful of the magic, and he’d heard those stories about the master. But I told Toristel,” she added with a dry chuckle, “that I’d be perfectly safe as long as I didn’t marry his lordship and then run away with someone else. Toristel had to admit there was small chance of that, since I was already married to him.

“We didn’t have much choice but to come here, anyway. My daughter was on the way, and there was no