The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

hired to look after the house, but at first it really meant looking after him.”

“I bet he was a difficult patient.”

“He never threw soup at me,” Mrs. Toristel said, giving Nora a significant look. “Anyway, he had his books here, and he managed to do his work, even though he was in a chair all the time. He put a spell on it to make it move, you see. I didn’t know it would move without him, though.”

“It certainly does,” Nora said. The chair crouched in front of her like a huge insect, its wooden joints creaking. As she tried to sidle away, the arm with the tongs took hold of her wrist. “Stop that!” Nora said fiercely.

To her surprise, the arm obeyed. It hovered, as though waiting for a command, and then stretched toward the shelf with the books. With a pawing motion, it made a couple of passes at the books until it pulled one down. “Stop,” Nora said again, and the chair stopped moving.

Strange, she thought. Carefully, she took the book from the motionless tongs. “What does it say?” she asked Mrs. Toristel. With some hesitation, the housekeeper read: “On the Selective Breeding of Fruit-Bearing Trees, with the Aim to Increase Both Yield and Vigor.”

“That doesn’t sound very interesting,” Nora said. “Are they all like that?”

“Heavens, it would take me all day just to read the titles. This one I know, though,” Mrs. Toristel said, slipping out the book that had been next to the horticultural guide, an oversized volume with a leather binding that was turning to powder. “It’s for children. I learned to read from it myself.”

Nora opened the book. On the first page, a complicated curl of ink next to a picture of what seemed to be a sheep. A is for ama, she guessed—the most common of the twelve Ors words for sheep.

“Would it be all right if I borrowed this?” she asked hopefully.

Chapter 11

The brave warriors are ready for battle. Their long swords are eager to spill blood and carve the flesh of the enemy.”

Nora flipped back in the book to check something—that knot of brushstrokes, was it an r or long e?—then sounded the words out again slowly. The first sentences she’d managed to read in Ors.

Nice reading for little kids. She could hardly wait to hear what happened next.

By habit Nora pulled on the ring on her left hand—still stuck there—and looked up, trying to guess the time from the sunlight filtering through the tree branches. Four o’clock? Five? Back at the castle there were beans to shell and a kitchen floor to scrub. Mrs. Toristel would be back from Red Gate soon. Nora stretched, thinking that she should get up, not really wanting to.

Some weeks back, cutting through the orchard, she had discovered a path in the tall grass that led through the sloping fields, threaded a grove of birches, and emerged on the banks of the river below the castle. Since then, Nora had gotten into the habit of walking down to the river when she had a free hour. It was always cool by the water, although no one else ever seemed to take advantage of that fact. There was one place where you could cross on stones to a small island, really just a slab of rock with a pine tree growing out of it. A good place for sitting and trying to read a book in a foreign language. The stepping-stones on the other side of the island were fewer and the water looked deeper; Nora had not yet attempted a crossing, although she could see that the path continued, carving a narrow passage through the wild black firs on the far bank.

Now, as Nora stood up and tucked the book into her basket, she looked across the water and felt a pulse of curiosity. Why not? she thought. The beans can wait. She put the basket down and walked to the water’s edge.

She stepped to the first rock, then leaped to the next one. The ankle that had been broken felt perfectly sound, Nora was pleased to note. She launched herself at the next rock.

“What are you doing here?” someone asked testily, directly ahead.

Nora checked herself in midspring, and discovered that both the rock she had left and the one she was aiming for were equally out of reach.

The water was not as deep as she’d feared, but colder. She thrashed around, fighting the current. The person on the bank had extended a hand. She grabbed it. Pulling herself upright, she recognized the magician. His black tunic was only a little darker than the forest shadows.

Nora scrambled out of the water. “You startled me.”

She thought she saw his mouth twitch. “My apologies,” he said, more cordially than before. “I did not intend for you to throw yourself into the river.”

“Neither did I.” Nora looked down at herself ruefully; her dress was completely soaked. “I don’t suppose you have any magic to dry clothes?”

“Certainly,” he said, with a lift of his eyebrows.

The water trickling out of her clothes picked up momentum; she watched the dampness recede down the length of her dress. She felt a little queasy and much warmer. “Thank you,” she said.

“I thought you didn’t believe in magic,” the magician said.

“I don’t know,” Nora said. “I just find it somewhat—unexpected.”

“That is not a bad thing,” Aruendiel said, surprisingly. “Magic is not something one should take for granted. Not at all.” Briefly, he seemed to be thinking about something else. “You haven’t answered my question yet,” he said, more sharply. “What are you doing here?”

“I come down here sometimes to see the river. I wondered where the path leads.”

He studied her through narrowed eyes. “Indeed. It is a long climb up and down the hill, no small exertion for a mending ankle.”

It was hard to tell whether the sharpness in his voice was from concern over her leg or something else. She told him that her ankle was fine, that she walked everywhere now.

“Show me,” Aruendiel said, and watched as Nora walked a few paces along the riverbank and returned. “No pain?” Kneeling, he ran a hand over her shinbone and palpated her ankle joint. “It has healed well,” he said finally, sounding more cheerful than before. “Of course,” he added, rising, “it is not so hard to set and mend one bone at a time. Mending several dozen, that is more complicated.”

Nora looked at him curiously. A war injury, Mrs. Toristel had said. He held himself with more ease and vigor than she remembered from their previous meetings, and he seemed younger, closer to forty than to seventy. She could even see a certain resemblance to that portrait of his sister. On one side of his face, the planes of cheek and brow and jaw were smooth, strong, intact. The other side was rough and broken. He might have been handsome once. But overall, there was a sense of dilapidation about his lean face and frame, an impression of odd angles, joints that were out of true, a great disorder patched together and animated in an act of unlikely improvisation.

She wanted to ask him exactly how he had broken dozens of bones at once, but instead she said, “How was your trip? I didn’t know you were back.”

“I returned today, a few hours ago,” Aruendiel said. “The voyage itself was damp. But all was resolved satisfactorily. A matter of reversing a sea god’s curse.”

“A sea god?”

“A local deity,” he said dismissively. “Now, can you cross the river without falling in again? These woods are not the proper place for an afternoon stroll.”

She turned and jumped to the island, conscious that she was making a little show of her agility. He came behind her. “Where does the path go?” she asked, picking up her basket.

At first she thought Aruendiel was not going to answer, but then he said: “Into the hills. It used to run up to the sheepfold, when we grazed sheep on these slopes.”

“But this is all forest.”

“So it is.”

To her chagrin, her foot slipped on the opposite bank, and she had to grab a root to keep from falling.