The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

work for us near Lusul. People held it against me that I’d told his lordship about his wife leaving. As though he wouldn’t have found the truth in the end, anyway. This place seemed like the end of the earth after Lusul, and the winters are terrible, but you can get used to anything.”

“And he never married again?”

Mrs. Toristel seemed surprised at the suggestion. “Oh, no.”

“It’s a sad story,” Nora said.

“Yes, well, it’s an old story now. But I’m telling you this because you might hear worse from others, and you should know the truth.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Oh, it’s been many, many years.”

“How many?” Nora asked, doing the arithmetic in her head. Mrs. Toristel couldn’t be younger than sixty, surely. Sixty-something minus twelve? Surely not. But the housekeeper confirmed it: “It must be four dozen years or more. Yes, I married Toristel four years later, and we’ve been married forty-seven years.”

“So, fifty-one years ago this happened? How old is he?” Maybe the magician had married very young. She made a hesitant guess: “Seventy?”

Mrs. Toristel gave a gentle snort and shook her head. “Seventy? Ah, he’s older than you’d think.”

“Eighty? No. Impossible.” Nora was incredulous. “He looks old, but not that old.” The housekeeper only smiled. “Is this more magic?” Nora demanded.

“What do you think?” Mrs. Toristel said.

I think something very, very bad happened to Mrs. Aruendiel, Maggie. But maybe I’m projecting.

I should have told you this before: I got married. Before I came to this place. It was a disaster. My husband cheated on me and almost killed me. I left as soon as I came to my senses.

Some other things happened, but I don’t want to talk about them right now.

One of the village women was heavily pregnant, and every time Nora saw her, her round belly drew Nora’s eyes like the moon. That could have been me, Nora thought wonderingly. By now, she estimated, she would have been maybe seven months along, big and slow, no doubt getting tired of being pregnant but quietly happy, feeling the baby grow stronger—

“Enough,” Nora told herself severely, but it was useless, she couldn’t stop thinking about it. She missed the child she might have had with a longing that she could not put a shape to, even if there was a horrific suspicion lurking in the back of her mind that the baby was not exactly a baby, just as its father was not exactly a man. What she also missed, she realized now, was the baby’s mother, the hopeful, joyful—deluded—Nora who was now a phantom, too.

“It came too soon,” Mrs. Toristel said with a sigh, when Nora ventured to ask her about the baby one day as they were packing dried plums into boxes. “There was nothing to be done. He told me the next day, after he stayed up with you.”

“He told me that it was a good thing that the baby was gone. A good thing.” Nora paused. “Was there something wrong with it?”

“You were lucky to live, that’s all I know. Take this from someone who lost two of her own before they were born. Some things weren’t meant to be. This batch is all wormy, Nora, didn’t you notice when you were sorting it?”

Deciding what next to tell Maggie, Nora found that her eyes were wet. She squeezed her lids shut and felt the tears burn.

I’m depressed a lot, yeah. But there’s a lot to be depressed about.

I try to keep busy and be useful, and I’ve learned how to do things like milking cows and goats. Cooking on a woodstove. I get distracted for a while, and sometimes I’m kind of proud of just surviving in this place.

Then I think, What am I doing here? Nothing I’ve done in my entire life matters now.

I mean, yes, I was having problems in grad school—but when I think I’ll never have the chance to even try to finish my Ph.D., it just feels hopeless. Like I’m trapped.

And I miss—well, everyone in my life. Maybe not Adam. But everyone else. Even Naomi. It’s still sinking in, that I might not see you or my parents or my sisters or anyone else again. I remember that awful night, the party after the rehearsal dinner, wishing my life were different. I didn’t mean like this.

This letter to Maggie was not turning out well, Nora thought. She wasn’t telling enough of the truth, or maybe she was telling too much, and now she felt worse instead of better.

She pulled one more weed, then stood up slowly, stretching her cramped legs, and half considered going to the bathhouse now, stares or no stares. But she had promised Mrs. Toristel to help her clean some of the unused rooms on the ground floor of the manor house.

* * *

Some of the rooms were quite grand, except that the tapestries on the walls were moth-eaten and most of the furniture was missing. Mrs. Toristel said that Aruendiel had sold it off years ago.

“If he’s such a great magician, why he does he let this happen?” Nora asked Mrs. Toristel, as she surveyed the wreck of a drawing room. The naked frame of a solitary armchair stood in the middle of the room, reflected in the cracked mirror propped against the wall. “Why can’t he at least keep up his own house?”

Mrs. Toristel came as close as she ever did to rolling her eyes. “Can’t or won’t,” she said. “His purse is never very full, that’s the truth, but he does find the money for things he likes, books or horseflesh or what have you.”

“It wasn’t like this at Lusul, was it?” Nora asked slyly. She had discovered that Mrs. Toristel loved to talk about Lusul—not the scandal around Aruendiel’s wife, which she had not mentioned again, but the opulent, bustling life of the estate itself.

“Yes, but that was his wife’s house, you know. This place was always his family’s seat. It’s a very old line,” she added. “Not as prominent as the Lusars, but much older.”

“Does that mean better?” Nora asked. Mrs. Toristel only gave her a reproving look.

The next room was almost empty except for a pile of broken furniture. Surely there was no need to clean here, Nora thought, peering through the door. Then she saw the books, piled haphazardly on a shelf.

She couldn’t resist. One look.

Halfway across the room, she had the sudden intuition that she was not alone. Mrs. Toristel was still in the hallway. This was something closer. She looked around, puzzled. It was almost as though she’d heard her name called, in happy recognition, by a voice that was somewhat familiar to her. She felt warmed suddenly. Was it only being in the presence of books again?

A clatter like a small rockslide drowned out any imagined voices. The heap of broken furniture rushed toward her. Nora recoiled.

No, it was just one chair. A high-backed oak chair that managed to be mobile, thanks to the four small wheels attached to the legs. A rickety-looking wooden framework was affixed to the scrolled arms.

The assemblage rolled rapidly after Nora and, thankfully, stopped just in front of her.

“I’d forgotten that was here,” Mrs. Toristel said from the doorway. “My goodness, it moved quickly.”

“Yes, it did,” said Nora, backed up against the wall, wishing she had something large between her and the chair. With a noisy shudder, part of its framework unfolded; it was composed of several jointed poles, each with a different attachment at the end: tongs, a cup, a nasty-looking hook. “What is it?” she asked, dodging, as the tongs reached toward her.

“That was the master’s. He could wheel himself around the castle—the ground floor, anyway—and reach whatever he wanted with those long arms. When I first came here, that was the only way he could get around, unless someone carried him, and he never liked that.” Mrs. Toristel shook her head. “Oh, it was a shock to me when I came here and saw him all crumpled up in that chair. And his face so scarred, that had been so handsome—I wouldn’t have known him, except for his voice.”

“What happened to him?” Nora tried not to sound as curious as she felt.

“He was injured in the war that was fought all over the country when I was young. Toristel and I were