The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

Despite his limp, Aruendiel navigated the stepping-stones with a nonchalance that Nora found ever so slightly irritating. His legs were longer, she reminded herself, and he had probably crossed here a thousand times.

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” she said as they started up the path to the castle. “About how I can get out of here—that is, go home. Back to my own world.”

Aruendiel cocked an eyebrow. “Well, how did you get here?”

He was the magician—why couldn’t he tell her? “I don’t know,” Nora said. “But the last completely normal, ordinary, nonmagical thing that I remember is going to the mountains with some friends, for a wedding.” She described that weekend, her walk in the woods alone, then finding her way to Ilissa’s gardens.

“You believe something happened to you on that mountain,” Aruendiel said.

“Maybe some kind of accident. I’ve wondered whether I might have hurt my head and become, well, confused. Or maybe—” This possibility had come to her in a black moment; she had tried to dismiss it, and failed. “Maybe I died.”

To her secret terror, and also relief, Aruendiel took the idea seriously. He frowned for a moment. “Perhaps. It is unlikely, however. A ghost remains a ghost in any world, and you are certainly alive in this one. There is no sign that you have died even once.”

She could not help laughing a little at that. “The graveyard, though. It could have been a sign of my death.” He wanted to know more about the graveyard. “It was just a few old headstones in the middle of nowhere,” she said, and recounted how she had gone into the cemetery to read the inscriptions on the graves.

“You read the words aloud?” Aruendiel asked. When she nodded, he said: “Some kind of spell there, cloaked in the poem.”

“Really?” Nora asked, dubious, fascinated. She ducked under a low-growing branch, trying to keep up with him.

“It’s clear enough—there’s a gateway in the graveyard that goes from one world to the next.” In a quickened tone, he asked: “Does Ilissa know about it?”

“Well—” Nora was not sure how to answer the question. “She knew about the graveyard.”

“I thought she might know of such a door to another world. She’s not from this one, we know that. But then why hasn’t she used this gateway to escape?” Aruendiel turned to look hard at Nora, as though she might actually know the answer.

“That first day, she talked about the graveyard as though she hadn’t seen it for years. And then the second time—” Nora tried to piece the memory together. “She was angry. She didn’t want me there. I remember throwing up. I was pregnant then,” she added, the last few words in a subdued voice.

“Morning sickness.”

“I guess. I never really had any, except for that one time.”

“You were fortunate,” Aruendiel said. “Well, Ilissa would not want you wandering back to your world while you were carrying her heir.”

They were coming to a subject that she preferred not to think about. But his words had triggered another memory. “Actually—” Nora said. “I could see, inside the fence, that the ground was torn up, and there was one of those yellow ribbons that they use at crime scenes. Do you know what I’m talking about?” Aruendiel shook his head uncomprehendingly.

“Never mind,” she went on. “The point is, it was from my world. I was looking through the fence at a piece of my world. Why the police tape, I don’t know.” No, she did know. It was because of her own disappearance. At some point searchers must have tracked her, probably with dogs, to the graveyard. And then what? Her trail ended. No doubt the police had never once thought to look for magical gateways to alternate universes. More likely they considered other, more reasonable explanations for Nora’s disappearance: wild animals, serial killers.

And her parents must be—Nora shoved that thought down quickly, unwilling to imagine what they must be thinking. First EJ, now this.

“The fence around the graveyard,” Aruendiel said. “Was it made of iron?” Nora nodded, and he looked very pleased with himself. “Of course. The Faitoren cannot abide iron. It is like poison to them. That was how we were first able to defeat and confine them, with weapons of iron and steel.”

It all sounded highly unlikely, this antipathy to iron—except that she had heard something like this before. “Wait, fairies! Do you mean to say that the Faitoren are fairies?”

Aruendiel shrugged. “Is that what they are called in your world?”

“Yes, except there’s no such things as fairies! They exist only in folklore, stories.” Nora added: “There is an old theory that fairies were actually a Bronze Age people in Britain who went into hiding to escape invaders with iron weapons, but that’s just a historical explanation for the legend. In my world, if you call something a fairy tale, by definition it’s not true.”

Aruendiel rubbed his chin—touching his hand to the good side of his face only, Nora noticed. “I never came across any Faitoren when I was in your world. Although that doesn’t mean that they weren’t there, or that they had not been there before.”

Nora seized upon the one notion that seemed to have some relevance for her. “This gateway, though. To get back to my world, all I’d have to do is go back into the graveyard again, right? Would you help me go there?”

A flash of interest kindled in Aruendiel’s face, but then he shook his head. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to take on Ilissa,” he said. “And I defy you to find another magician who could have extracted you from her castle. But it would be suicidal to battle her on her own turf.”

“What if I took, oh, a sword and just marched in?” Nora said. “That’s iron—steel. She couldn’t touch me, could she?”

“She could still enchant and bemuse you,” said Aruendiel with a dark smile. “As she did before, as she has done to people much older and much wiser than you.”

“Well, how else could I get back home? How did you get there?” Nora demanded.

“I was traveling, passing through the thin places between worlds, and when I tried to return home, I found myself in yours. It was no great catastrophe. I only had to wait until another thin place opened up in the skin of your world and then slip back into my own—a matter of a year or so.”

Nora was dismayed. “That long?”

Aruendiel shrugged his shoulders. “I passed the time tolerably well. It was intriguing to see how a world can be organized without magic. There was magic there, of course, but the inhabitants might as well have been blind or deaf, they were so unaware of it. Of course they were ingenious in other ways,” he added, as though making a belated attempt at politeness. “Those great ships, and the swift carriages that run on iron roads, and the mechanical devices for sending messages—telegroms, they were called—were very impressive.”

“Hmm,” said Nora. “When was this? Never mind—this thin place you used, is it still there?”

He shook his head. “It knitted up long ago. But other thin places will develop. They come and go, like little bruises, as the different worlds touch one another. My friend Micher Samle has made a study of them. He is away in another world right now—your world, very possibly. I spoke to his former apprentice, Dorneng Hul, when I was last in Semr, and Dorneng expects a way back will open within the next ten years or so.”

“Ten years? What will I do for all that time?”

“Do?” He seemed puzzled.

“Yes—earn my living, pass the time, whatever.”

Aruendiel took a minute to turn this new problem over in his mind as they walked along the stone wall that marked the edge of the upper pastures. “In your own world, what is your station?” he asked finally. “Despite your alliance with the Faitoren prince, it seems to me that you are not originally of the nobility.”

Nora smiled tightly. “Oh, can you tell?”

“But you are not a peasant, either, I think. What is your father’s livelihood?”

“My father is in IT,” Nora said, using the English abbreviation. “Don’t ask me to explain what that is. As for me, I was in school, studying various books, preparing to become a teacher.”

There did not seem to be an Ors word for “literature,” and she had some trouble making the magician understand that it was a legitimate field of study in her world. At first he had the idea that her studies consisted of memorizing long epic poems, just as, early in his education, he had had to commit to memory great swathes of works such as the magical chronicles of the Nagaron Voy and the saga of the Six Kings’